Touch of Dzenis

New performers have recently moved into the 130-year-old building of the Riga Circus. Having built a stage in the stables, actors Ance, Āris, Klāvs, Reinis and the other members of the theatre company Kvadrifrons are reinvigorating and preserving the tradition of live art in the circus. The name of the group is an acronym in Latvian that conveys their ethos: they are an organisation that can chill with their friends, have bursts of amazing creativity, and whose members are far from unintelligent. And all the while, the strong smell of elephants wafts through the building. Here and there, the life of the previous inhabitants makes itself known. Soon shamanistic rituals alternate with clowning around, fortune-telling with illusion juggling, stagecraft with personal choices. Then suddenly, out of Nothing… emerges Theatre.

Alice von Trota returns to her father’s manor in Latvia in 1919 to sell it and start a new life. She meets the hostile resistance of the local workers and discovers she has been lured into a carefully tailored trap set by a demonic lawyer, a decadent underground organisation and its necrophile leader. While escaping the clutches of her “helpers”, she meets some silent-cinema enthusiasts and learns to use the cinematograph as a tool for healing and self-discovery, as a weapon against her enemies and as a way to create a masterpiece.

Riga isn’t necessarily beautiful in winter. But it is alive. Kārlis accidentally runs over Kirils, breaking his bicycle. To fix it, they set out together to find a repairman – who, of course, has disappeared somewhere. One coincidence follows another, one encounter leads to the next, and their seemingly aimless wandering through Riga gradually turns into a friendship. It is a symphony of youth played out amidst falling snow, the noise of traffic, the voices of the city and improvised music. Carpe diem – they seize the day.

Vārdotājas (Wordsmiths) traces the recent rise of women's stand-up comedy in Latvia, but it is by no means just for laughs. Feelings of discomfort, shame, shock, are just some of the subjects tackled.

Lonely, 45 year-old worker Kasandra has just received a lethal diagnosis from her doctor. She goes to her high school reunion, confused, and is faced with phantasmagorical events that completely shatter her daily routine. Kasandra flees from the city. In the forest, she is engulfed by a river and brought to a secluded sea shore. Alone and over time Kasandra experiences an unusual healing and rebirth.

Harry Berzins is abducted by aliens. Traumatic experience gained is on a foreign planet, where the gray race rules and makes Berzins feel excluded. The only creature he believes is the odd Ufologist Vilma Kavace. While Vilma uses Berzins as an alien attraction bait, his mother, impregnated with a Latvian sperm on another planet, carries his child. Shieet.

Trains and railroad tracks are the unifying elements in this found footage film made out of fragments from feature films produced in Latvia from 1958 to 1989. It’s a cinematic journey into the world of dreams, filled with memories, desires, and the incessant quest for the ever-elusive happiness. The trains have played an important role in the history of cinema. A lot of interesting phenomena are linked with trains – locomotion, changes, an opportunity to think, dynamics, force, sense of something important… It helps to cross the usual boundaries.

A couple that does not fit into society’s accepted norms regarding women and men. Routine problems of everyday life that tend to take on immeasurable amplitudes push the film’s leads into a most intimate confinement, one in which thoughts and the answers to problems lead to dreams.