Tālivaldis Margēvičs

Ten years have passed since we made the film “Crossroad Street”, about a small street in the suburbs of the city of Riga. Now we’ve come back. Perhaps it was a sense of duty, perhaps nostalgia that brought us back – who knows? Perhaps it was both. Daiga, Aldis, Osis – they’re all our people. The first film had an impact on both the filmmakers and the residents of Crossroad Street. We found friends whom we want to meet again and again. Society has become more prosperous, several value systems coexist side-by-side. People often live in these systems as though they were in different worlds that never meet. We felt that the world inhabited by our people is sinking into oblivion, and so we wanted to show that it still has its own turbulence, that Crossroad Street resembles Latvia’s palm – the place where a fortune teller can see the lines of its destiny.

Zolitude is inhabited mainly by immigrants. An extremely denational environment, a disorderly everyday life, depressing standard type architecture - these are the problems faced by the film's characters.

The fates of the students involved in the Latvian educational system reforms and that of their teacher – the screenwriter and film director, Tālivaldis Margēvičs, are unusually intertwined. This leads to thoughts on various, current integration problems and on universal human values.

This is the 3rd film in almost 30 years about the daily lives of the people living in this small street of Pārdaugava. We first met them in the late 1980s when the Soviet Union was on the brink of collapse. We visited them again in the wild 1990s. And now we meet them in 2013, again in a whole different world.

A runaway bride, a young peasant, mysterious illusionists and a manic investigator become entwined in a murderous affair at a Baltic German baron's manor.

Using previously unpublished footage shot by amateurs in the era of 8 mm cameras, the film is about the simple human life of those who lived in the Soviet Latvia from 1940 until 1991, a time when a double-moral reigned in society.

Crossroad Street is a small street just 800 metres long on the outskirts of the Latvian capital, Riga. Its various inhabitants, each with his or her own destiny, daily life and relationships with the neighbours, form a microcosm of the country during the time of the Awakening. The genuine interest of the film's creators in the so-called average person earned a number of international awards, including a European Film Award for best documentary in 1989.

Beatrise is drifting in life. She has based her existence on unsuccessful relationships that have collapsed, like sand castles, one after the other. Forced to re-evaluate things, she realizes that she can only achieve harmony by learning to rely on herself, and not on illusory feelings or words.