Jānis Putniņš

Four directors capture simple, yet quintessential experiences of a single individual in different periods of his life - childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age.

A young woman, Regina, has been killed in her apartment. Investigator Anderson holds Regina’s husband as a suspect for a murder because he is unable to remember his location at the time of the fateful event. Gradually, Anderson is convinced that Oto has not only killed his wife, but he also tries to hide his true identity – notorious criminal Schmit.

The movie shows a young man's life dramatically changed after his friend is murdered. It is ironic - if to look with today's eyes - and nostalgia evoking portrait of marginal society and environment in the early 1990s with allusions to the western cinema - film noir related themes, surrealistic features, avantgard cinema stylization and formal aesthetics.

In spite of bad omen about the upcoming storm, the fisherman sets out to the sea and doesn’t return. The wife of the fisherman embarks on a journey to find the storm whisperer who could calm down the sea and return the fisherman home.

In April 1969 Ilya (Eliyahu) Rips, then a young student of mathematics, tried to burn himself in a public square in Riga, Latvia protesting against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He was stopped and eventually sent to a psychiatric hospital for two years. Thanks to international pressure from the mathematical community in 1972 he was allowed to emigrate to Israel. Now he is considered one of the most brilliant mathematicians in the world. At the same time, for most people familiar with his name, Rips is first of all associated with the development of the so called Bible Code – a mathematical program allegedly helping to decipher hidden messages encoded in Torah – the Five Books of Moses. He is attacked by both the scientific and religious community, yet his research continues.

Alice von Trota returns to her father’s manor in Latvia in 1919 to sell it and start a new life. She meets the hostile resistance of the local workers and discovers she has been lured into a carefully tailored trap set by a demonic lawyer, a decadent underground organisation and its necrophile leader. While escaping the clutches of her “helpers”, she meets some silent-cinema enthusiasts and learns to use the cinematograph as a tool for healing and self-discovery, as a weapon against her enemies and as a way to create a masterpiece.

Lonely, 45 year-old worker Kasandra has just received a lethal diagnosis from her doctor. She goes to her high school reunion, confused, and is faced with phantasmagorical events that completely shatter her daily routine. Kasandra flees from the city. In the forest, she is engulfed by a river and brought to a secluded sea shore. Alone and over time Kasandra experiences an unusual healing and rebirth.

Alex is a perfectly ordinary young man whose life changes radically after receiving a strange message and meeting several strange characters who seem to have stepped out of the world of cinema. Under the influence of Zenon's paradox, Alex begins to see the world differently and discovers unusual abilities.

Stylized as silent cinema, the film connects political and philosophical extremes of 1913 in a story of a young man participating at the creation of a new world. This mysterious adventurer, who was known as Peter the Lett, gets involved in a tragicomic and surreal race from a routine clerk job and a romantic passion in Riga to preparation of the world revolution in Vienna, psychoanalysis at Freud’s salon and seduction of Mata Hari in Paris.

Harry Berzins is abducted by aliens. Traumatic experience gained is on a foreign planet, where the gray race rules and makes Berzins feel excluded. The only creature he believes is the odd Ufologist Vilma Kavace. While Vilma uses Berzins as an alien attraction bait, his mother, impregnated with a Latvian sperm on another planet, carries his child. Shieet.

Trains and railroad tracks are the unifying elements in this found footage film made out of fragments from feature films produced in Latvia from 1958 to 1989. It’s a cinematic journey into the world of dreams, filled with memories, desires, and the incessant quest for the ever-elusive happiness. The trains have played an important role in the history of cinema. A lot of interesting phenomena are linked with trains – locomotion, changes, an opportunity to think, dynamics, force, sense of something important… It helps to cross the usual boundaries.

How did they meet? ... By chance, like all of us. What are their names? ... I would ask - what's your part? Where are they going? ... does anyone know where they are going? What did they say to each other? The host said nothing, but Jacques said that his Captain had told him that everything that happens here on earth, for good or ill, is written in the stars.

A brutal force interrupts the cowboy's journey to the city. In a state of unconsciousness, his consciousness is confronted with his subconscious, and the cowboy undergoes a painful ritual of self-purification.

A female ninja tries to break ties with her spiritual teacher. The seemingly unexpected and humiliating death of her teacher is only the beginning of this process; it is a decisive step in her life. The action takes place in a specific environment, and the characters, references, symbols, and movements are directly related to the history of cinema, more specifically, to Japanese ninja films made in the 1930s–1960s.

The film, based on Regina Ezera's story "It Dos All", has won recognition at the 23rd Latvian SSR Amateur Film Festival, receiving a bronze medal and an award for best cinematography. The main character remembers the unpleasant situation while relaxing in a Finnish sauna and an intrusive travel companion, although "it does everything", she does not want to do so.

Born in 1988, Kristaps finally wants to find out who is his real father. Family women do not tell if it is Guntis or Gvido. Kristaps goes to search for his father, acting as the boom operator of the documentary.