Gints Grāvelis

A unique, engaging film that combines documentary footage with narrative cinema to tell the story of four generations of a Latvian family. Sixteen year-old student Jānis has been given an interesting homework assignment – to draw his family tree and explain it. The story of his family begins with his great-great-grandfather who burned down the manors of German landowners during the 1905 revolution. My Family Tree takes us on a journey to various countries and political regimes, showing Jānis’ ancestors to be people of diverse fates and life stories. A rich Latvian trader, a red rifleman loyal to Lenin, a carpenter with the KGB and war refugees in Sweden are only a few branches on his family tree, and the boy has heard something unusual and unforgettable about each and every one of these people.

The creative documentary Piano Player is a story about the piano player and musician Oscar Strock, who was a well known tango music composer in 1920s Europe. Nobody knew him – only his music was well known. The life of Strock is like a side-show of everlasting debts, long voyages and wild and unlucky love affairs that find their best interpretation through his tango music. The piano player is a man, who barely arranges his life according to the political and economic circumstances in the world. To earn money, he plays for pubs and cinema theatres in Riga, Berlin and Paris, and for lovers, he writes the most romantic tango music.

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.

Alicija (33), a Polish-born liberal free-thinker, joins the Awakening movement in occupied Latvia. Her newlywed husband Ilgvars (53), a man with the experience of another generation, calls her to be more careful and cautious. With the support of a close friend, the poet Normunds (40), Alicija soon comes to the forefront of the Singing Revolution. However, alongside the first success, difficulties appear – Alicija receives an anonymous letter accusing Ilgvars of being a former KGB informant. His ambiguous answer leads to her wanting to find out the truth. Realizing that her husband’s actions in the KGB have affected the fate of her close friend, Alicija faces an unenviable choice. Torn by internal contradictions, she continues her work to restore the country’s independence, unable to find courage to resolve the situation. Alicija buries herself in her work and the emotional connection with her husband gradually fades away.

The relationships between two people are never easy. Especially when complicated by their professions. We are used to think that profession or occupation puts a stamp or a mask on peoples' personality. He is a pastor, she is a prostitute. Everything's clear. But underneath he is a man, she is a woman. Simple and difficult in the same time. Short film "Scortum" tells the story of the mazy relationships between sin and happiness which can never be solved.

In the late 1970s – at a time when the fiercest propaganda against Western culture was being waged throughout the USSR – an ardent rock and roll fan sets up a successful and illegal underground jeans factory in a Latvian psychiatric hospital.