Maria's Silence

A story about Emīlija Benjamiņa, the “queen of the press” in interwar Latvia, whose wealth and tragic fate have since become folklore. The film’s narrative covers the period from the beginnings of Emīlija’s magazine Atpūta (Recreation), to her arrest and slow demise in a train en route to Siberia. The most prominent clairvoyant of the time - Eugene Fink’s prophecy that Emīlija would die from starvation in a foreign land (which served to be true) weaves through the narrative as a red thread. With this strong woman at the centre of the story, the film shows Latvian society in all its richness and gives the audience the opportunity to meet many well-known historical figures.

A charcoal on paper animation about a motorcycling circus bear who decides to leave the daily routine and takes off to the forest where his true happiness seems to dwell.

A laid-back journey in search of one of the world’s most fascinating families, observed and examined from within its most intimate relationships, where the truth and depth of a memoir meet the ironic tone of an indie comedy.

Žanis Lipke, an ordinary blue-collar worker in Latvia, embarks on a covert operation. Despite his family’s hardship under successive Soviet and German occupations, Lipke tries to save local Jews from Nazi persecution and certain death, moving them from the Riga ghetto to an underground bunker hidden on his property.

1940. On the border between Latvia and the USSR, a woman is killed in front of her house as she tried to protect her son from the liberating attack of the Soviets. Almost 80 years later, the archive photo bearing witness to this news item and representing a collateral victim of the European Union’s founding conflict forms the starting point for a journey undertaken by Davis Sīmanis. He navigates from one side to the other of this border, which today represents another separation, one that is geographical but also cultural: between Europe and Russia.

In the final years of World War I a retired German field medic is sent to a remote sanatorium for soldiers suffering from post-traumatic mental disorders. There he encounters a strange, dreamlike state of existence that challenges his own war-torn mind.

The film is based on true events, it tells the stories of two outstanding personalities of the 20th century – Sergei Eisenstein and Isaiah Berlin, who were both born and spent their childhood in Riga but soon had to leave the city. The film follows the lives of the two characters during the turbulent first half of the 20th century, telling how one of them becomes “the greatest film director of his generation” in the totalitarian Soviet Union, and the other “the greatest thinker of his generation” in liberal Great Britain.

Stylized as silent cinema, the film connects political and philosophical extremes of 1913 in a story of a young man participating at the creation of a new world. This mysterious adventurer, who was known as Peter the Lett, gets involved in a tragicomic and surreal race from a routine clerk job and a romantic passion in Riga to preparation of the world revolution in Vienna, psychoanalysis at Freud’s salon and seduction of Mata Hari in Paris.

A film about the eccentric and paradoxical Russian philosopher Alexander Piatigorsky - a specialist on Buddhism and ancient Indian philosophy, a legendary character in Russian intellectual circles since the 60s, and a well-known writer who, "collects interesting people" and "doesn't wish to prepare for death".

The characters of the movie are closely twisted. Each of the heroes is a slave to their own passions. Only through strong will and some happy event they will be able to free themselves from their addictions.

The European championship football madness, drunken "experts" at the provincial stadium, the backstage of National team, raving fans at the streets of Paris and Lisbon. Football is a sport and entertainment through possibly there is more to the game. In the film "Working Class Ballet" philosophers, linguists, neuropsychologist and football coach are contemplating on the parallels between football and drama of life, forming an unusual tale on what football is or could be.

The documentary draws a portrait of an opera director who is staging Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre. He is torn between the tragicomic routine of an opera house and his own perception of Wagner and the Ring cycle. The film witnesses the director’s drama in maintaining the fragile link between a well-constructed performance and his own vision that lies within the music and the narrative, and is seen as German expressionism-like nightmares.

“As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relationships with this best and truest friend of mankind that death's image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling” - thus said Mozart about death. Mozart died in 1791 and was buried in a mass grave, as standard at the time in Vienna for a person of his social and financial situation. In 2000, 452 of Riga’s deceased — people without relatives, the homeless and the unidentified — were buried at the Jaunciems cemetery. But this film is not about death: it's about Mozart, The Magic Flute, Riga, and love. A short commissioned for the Latvian exhibition at Venice Biennale.

After the lives of several people are tied into a intriguing knot upon meeting police officer Krasts one hot summer day, they’re all brought together again on a full moon winter night. Intrigue develops among a couple of lovers, Gints and Elga, three adventure-race participants with one woman, Renate, on their team, three generations of a family whose father, Karlis, died in a tragic hunting accident, Karlis’s daughter Aija, his former lover Livija, and a young girl hardened by life, who lives at a Christian home for expectant mothers. A detective twist is added by a bit of poison, which one of them will get.

Ten years ago the Latvian National Opera was reopened after an immense reconstruction. Now this is the place where artists and the stage come together in an unusual atmosphere to create “the miracle” of music, action, text – elements of the opera phenomenon.

A portrait of prominent opera singer - bass-baritone Egils Silins. For 4 years, the crew followed the singer through the greatest European opera houses. The film reveals behind the scenes and perfor-mances of Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca at the Latvian National Opera, Wagner’s The Valkyrie at the Zurich Opera, Georges Bizet’s Carmen at the Vienna Opera, and Wagner’s Parsifal at the Munich Opera.