D is for Division

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.

In 1937, silent film star Maria Leiko travels to USSR upon learning of the birth of her granddaughter. But when she discovers the tragic circumstances of that event, KGB agents persuade her to remain in the country. Leiko abandons her cinema career to instead join Skatuve, the Latvian State Theatre in Moscow. Soon she discovers that she is being manipulated by the government amid its purges of political enemies. As a network of traitors, informers, and NKVD agents surround her, she must choose between family and career, and between her ideals and the lies of Stalin’s totalitarian regime.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Alex is a perfectly ordinary young man whose life changes radically after receiving a strange message and meeting several strange characters who seem to have stepped out of the world of cinema. Under the influence of Zenon's paradox, Alex begins to see the world differently and discovers unusual abilities.

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.

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.

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.

Death as non-existence, non-being, or the absence of life has been a subject of human interest for millennia. Poets, philosophers, prophets, and hermits have now been replaced by filmmakers, influencers, cryonicists, and evolutionary biologists in the search for the quintessence of life and death. Zoltan Istvan runs a cryonics laboratory and is running for president of the United States with the demand that immortality be included among fundamental human rights. In Russia, a mass festival dedicated to the cult of death is traditionally held. Dāvis Sīmanis' film essay reveals the twists and turns of man's age-old desire for eternal life. It uncovers the metaphorical and fetishistic representations of death and the mechanisms by which we come to terms with our own mortality.