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.
A film about a lonely woman with a yarn-ball in her belly.
It’s not the dog. A dark, starkly funny story of a single dog and the many different people she touches over her short lifetime. Man’s best friend starts out teaching a young boy some contorted life lessons before being taken in by a compassionate vet tech named Dawn Wiener. Dawn reunites with someone from her past and sets off on a road trip. After leaving Dawn, Wiener-Dog encounters a floundering film professor, as well as an embittered elderly woman and her needy granddaughter – all longing for something more. Solondz’s perversely dark comedy offers an appallingly honest look at the American experience, brought to life by its allstar cast.
What drives people to kill? Today hunting in Africa is something even an average person can afford. And in a certain sense, for many hunters from the Western world, Russia or China, it has become normal to travel to Africa once or even several times a year, and to go hunting daily. As a rule that means shooting two animals a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Some determinedly searching for trophies, others to enjoy. Even if every prey comes at a price, they always find a way to legitimize their own actions. The director wanted to show both how hunting is organized – what‘s involved in it – and what those who hunt experience emotionally.
It seems as if the richness of Zweig’s conflicted identity is created right then and there – on the big screen. Each one of us, even the smallest and the most insignificant, has been shaken in the depths of his being by the almost unceasing volcanic eruptions of our European earth. I know of no pre-eminence that I can claim, in the midst of the multitude, except this: that as an Austrian, a Jew, an author, a humanist, and a pacifist, I have always stood at the exact point where these earthquakes were the most violent.“ Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday The years of exile in the life of Stefan Zweig, one of the most read German-language writers of his time, between Buenos Aires, New York and Brazil. As a Jewish intellectual, Zweig struggles to find the right stance towards the events in Nazi Germany, while searching for a home in the new world.
In this futuristic romance, outsider artists create a world in which everything can be designed and controlled, everything but their own feelings. Do the partners truly love one another or are they merely fascinated by their own mirror reflections? An attempt to examine the narcissism of contemporary young people who are part of Poland’s artistic Bohemia in the age of social media and consumption. The film is inspired by lives of two Warsaw based artists. Wojciech Bąkowski is one of Poland’s most charismatic modern artists with a fully developed stage image. Zuzanna Bartoszek creates drawings, writes poetry, and is affected by a number of autoimmune disorders that make her look unique.
Rauni Reposaarelainen is an overpowering, alcoholic samurai who sows damage and sorrow in his surroundings in Meri-Pori, western Finland. A mystical pseudonym Shametear makes a contract with the Satakunta Guild of Ninjas in order to assassinate Rauni. Rauni easily survives the assassination attempt. This is the beginning of the bloody and absurd road movie in Meri-Pori’s samurai reality. The film is a surreal and visually beautiful tragicomedy that open-mindedly combines Finnish and Japanese culture with beautiful northern nature.
A bourgeois dog confesses how he was transformed from being a filmmaker to being four-legged: Unable to find financing, Julian is forced to accept a job as a seasonal farmhand. However, he makes the young Canadian expat Camille believe that he’s going to do research for a communist fairy-tale film and offers her the leading part. They arrive at the deceitfully idyllic scene of an exploitative apple plantation. While Julian finds the manual labour agonizing, Camille enthusiastically plunges into the alleged research. The owner of the plantation accidentally gets killed, and an attempted revolution ends up in confusion. At this moment, however, the sparrows in the trees come up with a plan…
A story of a young couple, the journalist Arvid Stjärnblom and Lydia Stille, who fall madly in love. They are both drawn to the dream of pure, great, and untainted love. Yet, the dream demands greater sacrifice than they could ever imagine. A passionate and fiery love story about the choices we have, the ones we don´t, the choices we make and the consequences that follow. This is an adaptation of Hjalmar Söderberg’s novel The Serious Game (1912) by the Swedish actress-turned-director Pernilla August whose creative life was previously closely linked with Ingmar Bergman and Bille August.
Eskil Vogt’s feature debut stars Ellen Dorrit Petersen as Ingrid, who has recently lost her sight. She retreats to the safety of her home, alone with her husband and her thoughts, but her deepest fears and repressed fantasies soon take over. Ingrid no longer cares about what is real if she can manage to visualize it. The director hopes that the story will tell a lot of different things about human beings, especially about their inner selves – all the strange, shameful, imaginative thoughts we all have, but which we often have a hard time sharing with others. Vogt and his team have a visual language that exists somewhere between reality and dream. This film just refuses to fade away in memory.
Southern Sami yoiks and blood. What happens to you if you cut all ties with your culture? Can you really become someone else? In the 1930s, Ella-Marja was sent to a boarding school for Sami children where they were taught to know their place, scientists from the State Institute for Racial Biology came to measure and photograph them naked, and speaking Sami, even just among themselves, resulted in beatings. In present day, she calls herself Christina and visits Lapland… This is the director’s declaration of love to those who left and stayed, a film about the dark pages of the Swedish history. Recommended by
Lithuanian provincial town is facing the economic crisis in 2008. Vytas gets fired from the factory. Pushed by his wife, he immediately starts looking for a new job, but not really successfully. After having his new haircut done, Vytas starts looking for a love affair with the hairdresser Marija, but not really successfully, either. Finally, Vytas gets involved into a third search – together with his best friend Petras he starts looking for a guy who posted video on youtube, claiming he saw Jesus Christ in their town. This is the only time Vytas succeeds…
The film is inspired by an event reported in the Bulgarian press. A social-realist parable exploring the themes of corruption, class differences, and the rural-urban divide in contemporary society. Tsanko Petrov, a railroad worker finds millions of leva on the train tracks. He decides to turn the entire amount over to the police, and the state rewards him with a new wristwatch, but soon the new watch stops working. Meanwhile, Julia Staikova, head of the PR department of the Ministry of Transport, loses Petrov’s old watch. And here starts his desperate struggle to get his old watch back, as well as his dignity.
The cinematic series about three significant figures in Latvian theatre – directors Oļģerts Kroders (“The Fifth Hamlet” (2007), Māra Ķimele (“Mara” (2014), and the newest about Andris Freibergs – all investigate how loneliness, love and death weave the films’ heroes’ lives and art together as if it would be a tight braid. In the “Fairytale” the accomplished European stage designer and educator paints a self-portrait by shaping the stage for an imaginary production titled Andris Freibergs. He transforms himself into a space that contains close to eighty years worth of stunning success, tragic loss, birth and death. It is an attempt to create the perfect empty space – one that would simultaneously encompass everything and nothing, the beginning and the end. The film is produced by the Riga-based VFS FILMS.
“The story starts in the 1990s, when Boris Nemtsov was widely viewed as the future president of the country. It ends in February of 2015, when he was assassinated on Moskvoretsky Bridge across from the Kremlin. Nemtsov is the only Russian politician to have left a significant mark on both eras: the 1990s, with their free press, political struggles, and low oil prices, and the 2000s, the time of stability and economic growth – but also the decline of political competition, growing censorship, street protests, and the invasion of Ukraine. Director Vera Krichevskaya and journalist Mikhail Fishman bring the riveting political biography of Boris Nemtsov to the screen. Many of the participants cast in this documentary would never find themselves on the same platform elsewhere. The people who talk about the crucial, often game-changing events of Russian history and the role Nemtsov played are his friends, colleagues, relatives, and fellow politicians: Alexei Navalny, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Mikhail Kasyanov, Alfred Koch, Ilya Yashin, Irina Khakamada, Grigory Yavlinsky, Viktor Yushchenko, Mikhail Prokhorov, Vladimir Ryzhkov, Raisa and Zhanna Nemtsova, Tatyana and Valentin Yumashev, Mikhail Fridman, Oleg Sysuev, Sergey Yastrzhembsky, Yevgeny Kiselyov, Nina Zvereva, Yevgenia Albats, Dmitry Muratov, and others. Because the producers have worked extensively with archival recordings, the film is built not only on interviews, but also on unique documentary footage of Boris Nemtsov, and his voice is constantly heard on screen alongside other narrators. The Man Who Was Too Free is the story of a man whose life – and death – are emblematic of Russia’s recent history.”
A friendly giant tries to help people but fear keeps them from seeing his good deeds.
