KIDS
WEEKEND
GREAT CINEMA FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY
Latvia is a small country. And this is just the fourth year that a festival of such international significance takes place in Riga. We need new and young people to fall in love with the beautiful world of cinema! This is an honest answer as to why it is so important to have a whole weekend dedicated to films for the whole family, why it is important to provide additional captivating pastimes as well… Two fascinating days of a cinematic adventure for schoolchildren, pre-school kids and their kin.
Father and son try to make the dying mother feel comfortable during her final hours.
A camel dies in the local zoo.
A journey to Mozambique in order to find the dear friend Nafta and to shoot a film…
The Wizard of U.S. is an animated collage, a social satire referring to a popular American story by L. F. Baum The Wizard of Oz.
In a deserted rich house, a couple of amphibians explore their surroundings and follow their primal instincts.
An odyssey through time and space, starting from the director’s own balcony. A journey filled with all the absurd, existential, trivial and sentimental thoughts and fantasies he came up with in a year, to see if it’s possible to grasp nothing more than the meaning of life. He is living in Brochmannsgate 12A, Oslo, Norway, Europe, Earth, Universe. This film is a time capsule filled with everyday life in Western Europe with all its holidays, memories and fantasies, questions big and small. It invites to think about one’s life and choices. What does it mean to be human today? And why do we rather want to speak to ourselves on a smartphone than socialize with strangers at a job gathering?
Waterfall and I, and – no, the other way around! This film is, of course, about nature – human nature. Or – what a human can do with the widest waterfall in Europe. “I feel as if I had exclusive rights to this place, because I grew up ‘framing’ it—I was too small to see the waterfall over the railings of Kuldīga Bridge and so I spent lots of time with my head stuck through the lower gaps in the railings. I have been convinced since then that it is not enough for anyone just to look at the waterfall. For instance, I wished to shoot a film there and others also have all kinds of waterfall-related wishes. My film is about wish fulfilment,” says the director Laila Pakalniņa.
The idea for this movie arose out of the director’s thought that came to him one cold morning in Warsaw: “Shit! How much time do I have left to make a movie about what it’s like to be young?” His hope with this film is to create a picture of how youth in all its crazy splendour can be more fully lived when you’re in it and more beautifully remembered once it has passed. Art school classmates Christopher and Michal restlessly roam Warsaw’s streets in search of living forever inside the beautiful moment. Never content with answers, they push each experience to its breaking point, testing what it might mean to be truly awake in a world that seems satisfied to be asleep.
Oleg’s Choice is a rare immersion into the private lives and thoughts of Russian combatants who have chosen to fight on the separatists side in Ukraine. Since the summer of 2014, thousands of young Russians poured into the Donbass region. Driven by Russian propaganda, they believed they were fulfilling their patriotic duty. Among the first wave of volunteers were Oleg and Max. Oleg was appointed deputy commander of a battalion, while Max became a soldier. Their illusions were shattered on the night of June 3rd 2015, when a battle went horribly wrong. While Oleg and Max continue to fight on the ground, they must also fight creeping doubts that they have that they ended up on the wrong side of the war. The film follows their introspection over the long term; the confession they have gone adrift, the search for meaning, the shock at realizing they have been misled – that they themselves have made mistakes to the frantic rhythm of a war that crushes bodies and reason. It is the story of the human face of a lie that confuses those involved. In this war rewritten by propaganda, where two parallel realities confront each other, they try in their own different ways to find a raison d’être. This is a human story on the borders of good and evil, where men are confronted by their own choices.
