Kristians Luhaers

Closing day of the season in the boarding house at the Vietinghoff Palace in the province of Latvia. Here the material world and atmosphere of the 1930s are reconstructed as fully as possible. According to the rules of the institution, guests must abandon all their means of digital communications. And this is what they are looking for: to disappear, at least for a while, and become inaccessible to the outside world. The lingering summer heat drags the guests into an insane frenzy where surrealistic and grotesque situations build up an ambiguous comedy.

Four Latvian legionnaires are sentenced to death for deserting the German army. A Latvian girl heads to the German headquarters to try to free her beloved. In the few hours remaining before the execution a love triangle plays out between the girl, a German officer and the prisoner.

Choosing the fate of a rock musician was similar to being a dissident. From the 60s, the Soviet Union tried to discourage and restrict the expansion of rock music by any means. They called it the “rotten fruit of degraded capitalism, demoralizing the minds of Soviet youth”. Despite that, rock music broke the wall – made a hole in the Iron Curtain – and gained the hearts and minds of tens of thousands of young people.Rock musicians were on the frontline of the rebellion against the Soviet regime. Despite censorship, they managed to deliver, in a hidden, roundabout way through lyrics and music, the spirit of nonconformity and freedom of choice to their audience. A film about Latvian and Soviet rock pioneers, their lives and destinies.

One night, Matiss Zelcs, an employee of the Latvian national archive in Riga, notices a woman on a bridge. After passing by her without preventing her suicidal fall into the depths, a sensation of failure and guilt changes his life. He cannot forget her. Driven by a feeling of remorse and the fever of illusion, he roams through the city night and day looking for traces of her existence. This journey through the tumult of his conscience leads him deeper into his own loneliness and the depths of his soul, as he gets more and more entangled in the destinies of the woman and of the people who were attached to her. He finds himself confronted with the pain of yearning and guilt, the cruelty of love and desire, and the search for forgiveness, release and salvation.

Historical reenactment of preparation in Nov. 17 and proclamation of independence of Latvia in Nov. 18, 1918 and in epicenter is only taken photograph of this historical moment.

Some of the most iconic images in Latvian visual history were taken 30 years ago, when the so-called Singing Revolution took place. This documentary that includes well-known and previously unseen 35 mm footage, is about those who took these shots, told in their own voices, their own emotions and memories.

During the Soviet time, choosing the fate of a rock musician was similar to being a dissident.

A documentary about Latvian actress Elvīra Baldiņa who's over a 100 years old and knows several thousand dainas (Latvian folksongs) by heart.

A portrait film about Aija Kuģe, an intelligent, charming Latvian woman who is married to a Serb, has lived in Belgrade for 25 years, and is a special correspondent for the American radio station "Brīvība" in Yugoslavia. At the height of NATO air strikes on Belgrade, she continued to report on events in Belgrade, despite increased surveillance by the Yugoslav secret service and NATO bombs. Aija was and is at the very heart of the Yugoslav conflict, as she has gained the trust of all parties involved in the conflict. Aija believes that no conflict can be resolved through repressive methods, weapons or bloodshed. The result of any military action is tears, death, and destruction.

“Today you will hear my most honest and truthful story about how I made a movie with Eisenstein and Pudovkin almost 90 years ago, how I shot from a bow in the movie Ivan the Terrible, about how I taught the Red Army to ski, how I built the Riga Film Studio, about Naval ships, about Stalin and life in the Universe."

The 1980s in music were marked by the maturation of the 1970s generation of musicians and the emergence of new rock bands in Latvia – Pērkons, Jumprava, Zodiaks, Dzeltenie pastnieki, and Zig Zag. Through their lyrics and later in more direct texts, the bands expressed their views on current issues of the time, such as freedom, independence, and occupation. Party officials did not like this very much, but they were no longer able to stop the process. The Singing Revolution had begun.

Galiņi was a deserted corner of Madliena, a former forestry house, when the Strazdiņi family arrived here, and in 15 years Galiņi has been turned into an exemplary vegetable farm. Three generations of the Strazdiņi family live and work here, but the film is about the youngest of them - Kristaps, Elīna, Raits and Mārtiņš, who are aged between 4 and 11. They live alongside their parents and grandparents in their daily lives in winter, spring, summer and autumn. They learn to work, think, and understand, because work is the foundation of their lives, so that they don't have to go to foreign lands in search of happiness...

Actress Indra Burkovska tells the story of her father Aleksandrs and his large family, and life on the farm through the 20th century when the farmer was both a master and a slave to his land. Aleksandrs presents a gift to the Ethnographic Open Air Museum that was his life’s dream – a threshing machine Imanta.