RIGA IFF SELECTION
The most important cinema of Europe and the world selected by the Riga IFF curators to dazzle the local audience and guests of the city alike. These are the titles that have already been, or potentially will be, awarded prizes from juries and experts from around the globe.
A teenage girl with nothing to lose joins a traveling magazine sales crew, and gets caught up in a whirlwind of hard partying, law bending and young love as she criss-crosses the Midwest with a band of misfits.
A group of soldiers in a small town on the Mekong River in northern Thailand are struck with a bizarre sleeping illness. In 2010, the Thai film director and artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s (1970) film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives received the Palme d’Or at the Cannes festival.
Forushande (The Salesman) is the story of a couple whose relationship begins to turn sour during their performance of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Forced out of their apartment due to dangerous works on a neighboring building, Emad and Rana move into a new flat in the centre of Tehran. An incident linked to the previous tenant will dramatically change the young couple’s life.
The film is based on the M.L. Stedman’s novel “The Light Between Oceans”. A lighthouse keeper and his wife living off the coast of Western Australia raise a baby they rescue from an adrift rowboat.“I’ve essentially made exploring relationships and families my life’s work to this point,” director says. “I feel as if my mission as a filmmaker is to explore the most intimate relationships in both private and expansive ways.”
In the 1960s, a successful businessman (Ewan McGregor) tries to find his missing daughter (Dakota Fanning) after police accuse her of a violent bombing. A man watches his seemingly perfect life fall apart as his daughter’s new political affiliation threatens to destroy their family.
Three days after the terrorist attack on the offices of Parisian weekly Charlie Hebdo and fourty days after the death of his father, Lary, a doctor in his forties is about to spend the Saturday at a family gathering to commemorate the deceased. But the occasion does not go according to expectations. Forced to confront his fears and his past, to rethink the place he holds within the family, Lary finds himself constraint to tell his version of the truth.
The film is based on The Childhood of a Leader – short story by Jean-Paul Sartre (1939) and John Fowles’s 1965 novel The Magus. A child’s angelic face conceals a budding sociopath in the audacious, senses-shattering feature debut from actor Brady Corbet. A powerhouse international cast led by Robert Pattinson and Bérénice Bejo (The Artist) headlines this dark domestic nightmare.
Nathalie teaches philosophy at a high school in Paris. She is passionate about her job and particularly enjoys passing on the pleasure of thinking. Married with two children, she divides her time between her family, former students and her very possessive mother. One day, Nathalie’s husband announces he is leaving her for another woman. With freedom thrust upon her, Nathalie must reinvent her life.
After the 12 years of absence, a writer goes back to his hometown planning on announcing his upcoming death to his family. As resentment soon rewrites the course of the afternoon fits and feuds unfold, fuelled by loneliness and doubt, while all attempts of empathy are sabotaged by people’s incapacity to listen and love. The film won Grand Prix of the Jury and Prize of the Ecumenical Jury in Cannes Film Festival (2016)
