SHORT RIGA
This includes the International competition and the Baltic student short film programmes, the Baltic music video competition programme and... lots of parties! Because it makes no sense to watch a whole lot of incredible cinema and leave without having a chat about it afterwards. Look for the "S" sign (or is it a snake?) for adventure – cinematic, social and just fun!
It’s a story about Kaido, a young man, who works in a botanical garden. He meets a girl, Liisa, who is the complete opposite of him. It’s a story about brutally honest love; a story about short glimpses of happiness that melt away like snow in July.
An absurdist drama based on Albert Camus’ novel The Plague. As an epidemic consumes a city, the inhabitants find themselves isolated from the rest of the world and in the direct presence of death.
A guy decides to be antisocial and flees to a country house together with his dog Tumsa (Darkness). The dog disappears, and as he is trying to find it he comes across his own fear of loneliness.
A desperate couple tries to conceive a baby, but unfortunately Vytas is infertile. They look for a solution and get creative in the process, trying out weirder and weirder methods. The situation slowly forces Vytas to question his masculinity. The story reflects the relationship problems of a messed up couple.
After falling out with his girlfriend, Pauls, an employee of an advertising firm, starts spying on Sandra, a woman who lives across the street. As Pauls’ obsession with Sandra develops, he becomes a witness to her murder.
A young director’s attempt at her first film using her own sexual experience.
Pranas used to suffer from a mid-life crisis, but now he is ready to come back to his family. It’s no easily done, so he decides to in stage his death to show his family how much they would lose. At the same time the world is living through a very intense diplomatic crisis which causes the a new world war. Still, there is no big difference between a family war or one in the world.
My oldest uncle is a schizophrenic and also a chronic smoker. My grandmother’s lungs started to fail due to the cigarette smoke, so she was forced had to move in with one of her daughters. Since then, my grandfather has had to take care of my uncle all by himself, being a silent witness of the imminent death of his beloved wife.
A six minute visual and musical remix of Ibsens Peer Gynt, Norwegian Folklore, Edvard Griegs composition, paralyzing panic attacks and The Great Boyg itself who finds us all.
A surrealistic trip into the world of an extremely long german word.
Tarikat is a visual poem of a journey towards enlightenment. Called by a mystic dream, Derya finds herself among souls steeped in the Islamic Sufi tradition. They join in hypnotic movements and stirring rhythms, dissolving into an ocean of silence.
One incident occurs, two families tangle. There’s nothing new under the sun.
You know the nagging thoughts that start with “did I leave the coffee on?” and turn in to “what if I give birth to Satan’s baby?” This hand-drawn animation explores anxiety, obsession, and one woman’s slippery hold on reality.
A film about the poor intelligentsia of Leningrad in the end of the eighties. Shot in a cramped flat in a city that was called Leningrad in 1989.
Based on the Flannery O’Connor Award winning short story by Mary Hood, How Far She Went examines the quarrelsome relationship between an grandmother, her estranged granddaughter, and how sacrifice can reveal the depths of love.
As thousands of men, women and children attempt to get into Europe, a comfortable English family sets out on what appears to be a holiday.
The old gardener works day to night in harmony with the nature’s rhythm and the wisdom of the ancient Latvian lives. His happiness and fulfilment is a garden, which no longer belongs to him, but he feels like it does. Younger house owners, desiring to make the gardener’s life easier, get a new gardener. Old gardener’s love of garden and an unwillingness to share it with anyone makes him decide an inevitable decision to stay in the garden of his family forever.
Dato has made many mistakes in the past, but after he fell in love with a deaf and dumb girl Inga , he is trying to change his life. Dato has only two creatures in world who believes in him, the dog and the girlfriend, But society doesn’t give a second chance and it ends up with the death of Dato.
At dawn a group of peasants tries to rescue the body of a young man from the inside of a well. Women veil their faces in silence while men endure the situation. In the center of it all, a mother awaits her son’s salvation.
Anton is lost in his own head until one day a yellow boot brings him to an exit.
The director wants frontal nudity, but the actor has too much to give.
With the shade around her waist / she dreams on her balcony, […] Under the gypsy moon, / all things are watching her / and she cannot see them. A surrealist journey through colours and shapes inspired by the poem Romance Sonámbulo by Federico García Lorca. Visual poetry in the rhythm of fantastic dreams and passionate nights.
Paul Wenninger traces the arc of representational history to representation-critical parable: he straddles the Uncanny Valley with motifs from found footage material from World War I, which he connects to the actors´ performances, to bring them into the image again using techniques from animation and then, with a diorama, to land in a museum-like ambiance.
Breaking the large and symmetrical with the small and singular; and vice versa—a principle continually applied in Josef Dabernig’s art. Here, too, in the film Zlaté Piesky Rocket Launch, which as a whole, can be interpreted as an allegory of the world’s (impossible to end) bipolarity.
Because she has been alone for a really long time and there´s just noone else, she might as well live on the moon.
The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music is a visual and musical journey through the fantastical funeral traditions and rituals of south Vietnam. It attempts to engage in dialogue with funerary traditions that pulsate in the same vein throughout the global south…
What’s it like to be massively pregnant with only four days until you’re due to pop? You’d like to jerk off but can’t even reach, your boyfriend is a useless, boring shit, and you’d like to have some fun, but you’re pregnant. Again. Yuk!!!
A grim display of misguided patriotism and tribal thuggery during the England-Germany 2010 world cup football match.
Erkin gets out of prison and wants to return to his former life. But everything has changed and he does not know if he can live as a free man.
Don Mariano travels by aeroplane and goes to dine at a prestigious restaurant which specialises in natural, quality red meat that is low in fat and cholesterol.
A tree is always complete in its own being. Human beings, on the other hand, always aspire to become something more, doing their best to hold back time in pursuit of eternal love, youth and beauty. In Hollywood, two lost souls seek to become heroes under the shade of a lonely palm tree.
“8kg” is a dark-humoured story about youngsters and their Friday nights, when all good (or bad) things usually start to happen.
