OPENING EVENT: SOUND WE SEE

RIGA IFF OPENING EVENT
FRIDAY, 8 / 09 / 2017
SOUND WE SEE: RĪGA
20:00* SPLENDID PALACE LARGE HALL

This year on September 8 at the Opening Night of the Riga International Film Festival the art and culture website Arterritory.com in collaboration with Echo Park Film Center, a Los Angeles-based media arts organization, will premiere an audiovisual project Sound We See: Riga. Its participants are 24 inhabitants of Riga: artists, photographers, musicians, writers.

A VERY LIMITED AMOUNT OF TICKETS ARE AVAILABLE TO THE OPENING EVENT – BALCONY SEATS ONLY. TICKET PRICE – 7€

*Doors open at 7PM to a gathering Splendid Palace Versailles Hall

The cinematic story about the contemporary Riga initiated and conducted by two directors of Echo Park Film Center – Paolo Davanzo and Lisa Marr – is being elaborated by Agnese Krivade, Aigars Bikše, Anda Lāce, Ansis Starks, Atis Jākobsons, Evelīna Ozola, Gunārs Binde, Ieva Epnere, Jānis Putniņš, Karlīna Vītoliņa, Katrīna Neiburga, Kristiāns Brekte, Krišs Salmanis, Maija Kurševa, Mārtiņš Grauds, Miķelis Baštiks, Miķelis Putniņš, Pauls Bankovskis, MAREUNROL’S, Sergejs Timofejevs, Odrija Fišere, Signe Birkova, Viesturs Meikšāns and Andris Freibergs.

The representatives of various art disciplines will learn the 16mm filmmaking technique and each of them will immortalize their Riga city-portrait in the course of a day and night as one minute on film. These segments will later be assembled into a 24-minute black-and-white short film – an emotional journey through the city, musically enlivened by the composer Platons Buravickis. The premiere at the RIGA IFF Opening Night will also be a concert as the music composed for this occasion will be interpreted live – simultaneously with the images on screen.

The Echo Park Film Center has already produced similar projects in Tokyo, Rotterdam, London, Seoul, Berlin, Mexico City, Vancouver and elsewhere, each time discovering something new about the city in its diversity as well as about the film art’s poetic potential that becomes available within this project not only to cinematographers but also to the representatives of other fields of art. Although the project draws upon the “City Symphony” genre practiced by the great Walter Ruttmann and Dziga Vertov in the beginning of the twentieth century, “Sound We See” reaches further in its concept by involving the different personalities and presenting the city as a truly vibrant, dynamically functioning organism.

Project “Sound We See: Riga” is supported by the Baltic-American Freedom Foundation, the State Culture Capital Foundation, and Live Riga in co-operation with Locomotive Productions, Baltic Analog Lab and manufacturer “Ērenpreiss Bicycles”.

The Riga International Film Festival is being developed with support of the European Commission’s programme “Creative Europe – MEDIA”, the National Film Centre of Latvia, Riga City Council, and the State Culture Capital Foundation.