Inga Apine

The old gardener works all day in harmony with nature’s rhythms and the wisdom of the ancient Latvians. His happiness and fulfillment is a garden that no longer belongs to him, but he feels like it does due to his large contribution to it. He speaks to the garden, and it responds, giving him shelter and a rich harvest. Autumn arrives and there is much work, more than the gardener can handle. The young homeowners, desiring to make the gardener’s life easier, hire a new gardener. The old gardener’s love of the garden and his unwillingness to share it with anyone else leads him to make an inevitable decision to stay in the garden of his family forever. This is a poetically symbolic story about disappearing time, the land and modern reality.

Summer, 1989. City girls, Paula and Laura, spend their summer holidays in a small town with their cousins, Maija and Linda. Four girls, left unattended, enjoy freedom, imitate the life of adults, plunge into reckless adventures and get into trouble. Based on true events, nine-year-old Paula’s story of growing up is set against the background of time when Lat-via made her first steps towards independence.

Dad is Drowsing

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.

Unmarried

Lame-o’s is set just before the Millennium, in 1999, and is the story of three school friends who are among the most unpopular girls in their class. The friends are determined to radically change the situation. The three friends at the centre of the story are Sarmīte, Sveta and Katrīna, who are studying in the last class of the secondary school. The upcoming Millennium and their approaching graduation make them undertake various measures to become appreciated and liked, which eventually challenge their friendship.

An insecure millennial woman pursues her dream whilst learning how to adult. While being preoccupied with life tasks at hand she can barely handle and also severe depression, main character of this film Marta (30) keeps dreaming about making films, drawn to the healing power of storytelling, but not having the courage to act these dreams out; sometimes she is too scared to even pick up the phone. Marta’s life seems to sway both in comic and tragic directions: it’s sometimes a mix of ultimate freedom, sex, drugs, friendship, laughter, alcohol, lots of alcohol, music, honesty and love, and sometimes the reality Marta avoids to face becomes so brutal she can’t take it anymore. Through the course of the film Marta learns there is an unavoidable question that at some point becomes inevitable for almost every filmmaker: if you really want to direct films, can you first direct yourself out of depression?

The true story about Latvian poet Austra Skujiņa, who spends her days dreaming and writing poems while working in the Ministry of Agriculture. Her accidental late night meeting with a policeman in a park triggers a series of unexpected events. The young poet is forced to face a choice between giving in to the policeman’s blackmail or informing on him to his superior. During these events Austra Skujiņa writes her last published poem.