The Private Life of Santa Claus

Based on the novel by same name by Vladimir Makanin. A cabinetmaker falls in love with a poetess who is courted by a university professor. The cabinetmaker has a wife and two high school sons. He is confronted with a difficult choice between family and beloved woman...

According to the story of the same name by Vladimir Makanin. Mitya Rodiontsev, a young employee of the research institute, for some time now became one of those who were in the close circle of the secretary of the director Aglaya Andreyevna and felt well protected from the vicissitudes of fate. Having become a “retinue”, Mitya was no longer engaged in science, but was busy for those who needed him, openly respected him and saw him as a future leader. But once Rodiontsev was not invited to the director’s office for a weekly tea party...

At the beginning of the summer of 1905, representatives of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party Krasilnikov and Elkonen turned to Captain Zhanis Trautman, a Latvian political emigrant living on the outskirts of London, with a proposal to lead a steamer with a cargo of weapons to the shores of Russia. Having recruited a team of old and tried comrades, Trautman changes the crew of an English cargo ship bought by the front men. In the course of the squabble that arose on this occasion, a sailor of the old crew, David Blake, was stabbed. The wounded Blake and the veterinarian Gruber, who accompanied the cargo of anthrax drugs, are forced to leave on board. On the high seas, weapons and explosives were loaded on board. The steamer headed for the Oresund Strait, where a messenger was to meet him.

Based on a story by Janis Lapsa, written by Janis Lapsa and Andris Kolbergs, film is a singular work, filled with human warmth. It is a story about a talented surgeon Markalns, who after a serious personal crisis, returns to his native town in order to start his life anew. The attention is concentrated on the inner world of Markalns, his feelings in this so important period of his life, when to endure and to proceed means to regain the lost sense of life and himself. His character and emotional world opens in a wide scale: in collisions with colleagues, patients, friends, himself. He is contradictory, but even in moments of low spirits, virile. A real warmth and balance of mind is brought in the life of the outwardly robust and clumsy surgeon by a shy small-town girl Irita, called Doggie.

At the beginning of the summer of 1905, representatives of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party Krasilnikov and Elkonen turned to Captain Zhanis Trautman, a Latvian political emigrant living on the outskirts of London, with a proposal to lead a steamer with a cargo of weapons to the shores of Russia. Having recruited a team of old and tried comrades, Trautman changes the crew of an English cargo ship bought by the front men. In the course of the squabble that arose on this occasion, a sailor of the old crew, David Blake, was stabbed. The wounded Blake and the veterinarian Gruber, who accompanied the cargo of anthrax drugs, are forced to leave on board. On the high seas, weapons and explosives were loaded on board. The steamer headed for the Oresund Strait, where a messenger was to meet him.

The film focuses on the so-called "French group" – a group of Latvian intellectuals arrested by the Soviet authorities in early 1951. Elza Stērste, Kurts Fridrihsons, Ieva Lase, Maija Silmale, Mirdza Ersa, Milda Grīnfelde, Miervaldis Ozoliņš, Irīna and Arnolds Stubauus, Alfrēds and Eleonora Sausnes, and Skaidrīte Sirsone were accused of treason for reading French literature and showing an interest in Western culture, and were sentenced to 10–25 years in Siberian camps.