Andrejs Strokins

Five women share their life stories with each other. They all have one thing in common: they were written by the renowned Latvian writer and master of realism Rūdolfs Blaumanis.

“TESA MAN” is a music film – a poetic exploration of the relationship between collective creativity and the natural world. The film blurs the lines between reality and imagination, inviting viewers into an animistic experience where music performed by the band Tesa in a frozen Baltic landscape attempts to transform air, steam, ash and clay into something much more alive.

In a cabin in the woods, an eerily pale woman holds a mysterious casket, a dark liquid dripping from her fingers. Inside a car wash, a driver looks for dead ones on his tablet. What’s the connection between them?

We literally found our film next to a dumpster. It was a bag containing 36 rolls of photographic negatives exposed between the 1960s and 1980s by an unknown photographer. We named him Anton, Aunt Emma's son. Looking through our contact sheets, with their many inaccuracies—blurred edges, random elements in the frame, haze, accidents, and double exposures—we tried to imagine what our lives would be like if these were our photos.