RIGA IFF īsfilmas: Kāpēc tu filmē?

Alina Panasenko
Prelude
Prelude
UA
2025, 14’, uk
Age 16+
Lyuba Knorozok, Kinotron Group

 

Three episodes and an epilogue. Anna films men she meets in Kyiv, whether by accident or intention. She seeks partners open to one-night encounters. With her camera, she caresses their faces, shoulders, pelvises and smiles. Anna collects their phone numbers, documents and savours the closeness. She spends a night with a soldier, going through her private archive together and confronting a reality and intimacy she had previously turned her back on.

 

Accompanied by Barbie-pink opening credits and set to English Baroque composer Henry Purcell’s What Power Art Thou, the hidden Ukraine unfolds through the eyes of the protagonist. It is not quite a diary of a call girl; however, as director Panasenko notes, the short film presents an unusual encounter between “us” and “them” by employing the conventions of the erotic drama subgenre. The filmmaker also effectively reflects on the objectification of the army, the archetypal masculinity underpinning the military and its way of life, and the (im)possibility of intimacy during war, occasionally alluding to David Wark Griffith’s Intolerance (1916).

 

Bernardo Zanotta
Tragedy
Tragédia
NL, BR, FR
2025, 15’, pt
Age 16+
Manon Bovenkerk, Bernardo Zanotta, Flavien Giorda, Yann Gonzalez, Davi Oliveira Pinheiro, Near/by film, Palermo/Wolfsburg, Venin Films, Ausgang

 

At the age of 13, Bernardo received a camera as a gift from his father, and he takes it everywhere he goes. Even on a winter holiday to a country house with his father and his father’s girlfriend, Laís, he documents everything he sees and thinks. As the girlfriends come and go like the seasons, his father’s behaviour grows increasingly mysterious. Suspicions of his father’s unfaithfulness to Laís, whom Bernardo has grown fond of, spark the forging of a vengeful state of mind.

 

A Greek tragedy of the video era unfolds before our eyes — or perhaps within the mind of Brazilian director Zanotta, who revisits footage shot in his adolescence to reflect anew on his relationships with his father and stepmother. Playing with the form of ancient tragedy, premonitions and the concept of catharsis, he has created a metafiction about the past that can be reinterpreted and reassembled in the present. It is Anatomy of a Fall (2023) deconstructed by a cinephile — a thriller that immerses the viewer in the duality of the medium and rivals the most suspenseful of crime investigation series.

 

Eero Tammi
The Ghost Feel Hour
Aavetuntohetki
FI
2025, 11’, fi
Age 12+
Eero Tammi

 

A lucid dream mixed with well-known masterpieces of cinema. Fiction mixed with mise-en-scène discovered across the street, just outside the cinema. When your mind and perception as a spectator are compulsively stimulated by what you have watched, do you begin to see cinema all around you? And if you happen to be a filmmaker, do you begin to see your own surroundings in cinema? The only tangible evidence — the movie tickets you’ve kept.

 

Tammi turns the simplest close-up of a cinema ticket into something akin to Hitchcock’s “knife scene”, while a static camera gaze lays bare everyday terrors in the spirit of Kubrick. Even the most ordinary rock is framed to remind us that cinema is constructed — transformed into a mystical, otherworldly object that sends existential chills down the spine. Much like Antoine Roquentin in Sartre’s Nausea (1938), unsettled by the sight of his own “strange hand”, Tammi’s introspective collage, showcased at the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, produces a similar effect of unease. 

 

Aya Kawazoe
Nonexistent, Like a Flash
Nonexistent, Like a Flash
JP
2025, 10’, jp
Age 12+
Aya Kawazoe

 

Your apartment is making you anxious. No, it’s not neurosis this time. A phone call causes wild, blood-curdling panic. Your present didn’t begin just now. The small music box carries you into a liminal space — somewhere between the sofa and yesterday, between childhood and analog cinema. What even is this place I call home? And who is this person that reminds me of myself?

 

Japanese filmmaker Kawazoe, known to RIGA IFF audiences as the creator of the philosophical riddle Howling (2023), moves toward a concept steeped in formalism. It is a parable about liminal life — we are that which exists between one state and another. Shot on Super 8 and digital formats, it mesmerises with a rich palette of sounds and images, including double exposures, strobe lights, and other cinematic tricks. Conceived as the first instalment in a trilogy for the Film for Music project, the short film offers a deep bow to Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and its exploration of the intersections of psyche and cinema.

 

Maung Sun
One Summer Day, I Drank Bubble Tea
One Summer Day, I Drank Bubble Tea
MM, FR
2025, 7’, en
Age 12+
Angele de Lorme, Maung Sun, Panorama Production, Electronic Pictures Production

If you’re an Iranian filmmaker, you’re sure to make it into film festivals. If you’re a Burmese filmmaker, chances are you’ll be on the festival radar, too. It doesn’t matter how good or bad your film is. Two directors reflect on privilege and cynicism, all while trying to maintain a clear conscience. The two reflect: am I being noticed for my work, or because of my country’s political situation? Do you see yourself as an artist or a political activist? Is this nothing but a safari of opportunities that someone still dares to call the film industry?

 

Most likely, this film would be selected for a festival by Panâhi himself. A conversation between two friends — Sun, a Burmese filmmaker, and an unnamed Iranian — turns into a volley of ideas and paradoxes. It’s hard to say what sparks more laughter: the fact that Sun calmly sips bubble tea at the foot of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Montmartre, or that his film, which comments on festivals as largely political events, has ended up in yet another festival. While this film is on its way to being selected for the next festival, the two friends don’t hesitate to remind us that their homelands are in flames.

 

Fabrice Aragno, Jean-Paul Battaggia
Rolle Workshop, a Journey 
Atelier Rolle, un voyage 
CH
2025, 30’, fr
Age 12+
Fabrice Aragno, L'Atelier, Casa Azul Films

 

Jean-Luc Godard. His studio in Rolle now resembles a museum. Close-ups alternate with wide shots, voyeuristically devouring every object in the room: a pair of scissors, Bresson’s book on cinema and politics, the last cigarette stubbed out in a glass ashtray. Everything seems imbued with meaning once you’ve seen at least one of Godard’s films, yet it is the sense of presence that gives it completeness. “Resistance has known youth, it has known old age, it has never reached adulthood,” his words echo across time.

 

Aragno accompanied Godard (1930–2022) in the final years of his life, right up to his last days, and served as cinematographer on Goodbye to Language (2018). This walk through the creative epicentre of one of the New Wave’s most influential filmmakers and thinkers, seen through a cinematic gaze, is intellectually seismic. Aranjo himself calls  it “a micro-macroscopic journey inside the inner forest of cinema.”

Although Godard often addressed the symptoms of cinema’s death — particularly in Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988) — this work stands as a testament to cinema’s refusal to die.