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.
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.
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.
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.
A psychological drama with elements of science fiction. Nurse Elza falls in love with her patient – a young, rich, and brilliant scientist Nicolas. He is trapped in a coma now, but previously he was experimenting with artificial intelligence. The recovery will take a long time and it’s not easy for both characters to build a mutual trust. Things are getting really complicated as the scientist’s invention – artificial intelligence Anna – manages to wilfully interfere in the relationship of the man and woman.
Because of ID issues, a man risks the authorities separating him from his underage daughter, who has just had a baby.
The Lithuanian scientist Aušra Revutaite has spent 30 years in the Tian Shan mountain range in Central Asia, straddling the borders between Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and the autonomous Chinese region of Xinjiang. Some 3,500 meters above sea level with only her faithful dog and gray cat for company, she studies climate change on the Tuyuksu Glacier at an old Soviet-era research station. She loves the solitude and silence that her painstaking work brings her. Magnificent shots of her surroundings and everyday work are interspersed with archive footage of the people who preceded her by a century. Not much seems to have changed. We see dripping, melting ice in imposing caves, streams flowing through desolate mountain passes, and Revutaite’s pets, playing together almost in silence. Living with Revutaite in the solitude she has chosen for herself, the two animals only have each other. The solemn silence of the mountains is punctuated sparingly by the music of a man far, far below, playing a traditional instrument.
