Liene Linde

Lulu is a young woman working in real estate, but in her heart, she longs for a career that’s more suited to her idealistic character. By chance, she meets Gerda, who gives her the opportunity to do social work and really help people. But the job turns out to be more challenging than she thought. As she engages in the complicated work of saving the world, Lulu breaks up with her boyfriend and moves back in with her mother, who is herself trying to start over, and her cynical grandmother, who ruthlessly criticises the professional and romantic lives of both women.

A young director, who sits in front of a commission defending a film based on her own experiences with sex and relationships, is continually confronted with questions about why she’s making the movie. The answer doesn’t come easy… Linde took on a difficult task for her short film.

An insecure millennial woman pursues her dream whilst learning how to adult. While being preoccupied with life tasks at hand she can barely handle and also severe depression, main character of this film Marta (30) keeps dreaming about making films, drawn to the healing power of storytelling, but not having the courage to act these dreams out; sometimes she is too scared to even pick up the phone. Marta’s life seems to sway both in comic and tragic directions: it’s sometimes a mix of ultimate freedom, sex, drugs, friendship, laughter, alcohol, lots of alcohol, music, honesty and love, and sometimes the reality Marta avoids to face becomes so brutal she can’t take it anymore. Through the course of the film Marta learns there is an unavoidable question that at some point becomes inevitable for almost every filmmaker: if you really want to direct films, can you first direct yourself out of depression?

Anita and her children, Santa and Kristaps, live in an apartment in Riga. Every year, they celebrate New Year’s Eve with grandma, uncle Peter and a feast fit for kings…

It’s not easy to make much sense of the world and grownups’ reasoning if one is only seven years old. This is a story about Justine and the morning of her birthday.

What does it mean for a woman to take up the role of mother? The film follows four Latvian women during different stages of pregnancy. An ambitious dancer has to put her career on hold while being pregnant. A housewife expects her second child and fears postpartum depression recurring. An urban party girl becomes pregnant, decides to get married and move to the countryside to build a new home from scratch. A young entrepreneur and ex-punk welcomes her first child yet is haunted by the traumatic events from her past. All four women offer a unique insider point of view of pregnancy, as part of the footage is shot by the protagonists themselves. They go through a mix of emotions, highlighting that pregnancy, contrary to mainstream representation, is not only about the child - it is about the mother, too.