RIGA IFF īsfilmas: Tev viss labi?

Gintarė Parulytė
Sujip
Sujip
LT, LU, NO
2025, 23’, lt
Age 12+
Greta Akcijonaitė, Vincent Quenault, Jeanne Geiben, Courtney B Ropp, Elisa Fernanda Pirir, Greta Garbo Films, Red Lion, Stær

 

It’s Aleksandras’ first day at the suicide prevention helpline centre. His colleague tries to involve him in solving a crossword, however, he can’t hide the obvious: he is a little nervous. When a call comes in, the script, which starts with a question about being in a safe space, gets derailed. The candour of the caller, introducing himself as Sujip – although his name spelled backwards –, makes Aleksandras break down and recall events from his own past…

Parulytė is a seasoned Lithuanian actress, theatre director, and filmmaker, living in Luxembourg. After moving to her new home, leaving Lithuania as a child with her family, he encountered the Kosovo War, which forms the basis of her latest short. Adeptly spinning the dialogue and revealing trauma from multiple points of view, she has created an attempt at healing and reconciling oneself with the past. Starring Kestutis Cicenas from Marija Kavtaradze’s Slow (2023).

Nebe Motýlová
tiny film about rape
tiny film about rape
CZ
2025, 9’, cz
Age 16+
Tomáš Šimon, Julie Sroková, Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague

 

It’s personal. A young girl’s story about sexuality, confidence, and her body within society since her teenage years. Collages of magazine cutouts and diary entries lead into an event that actually started much earlier, and the time after, when it seems nothing matters anymore. Why is it that others own the gaze turned upon our bodies, and “one tragic night” is not a single event, but a culture?

A meditation in animation technique on the consequences of sexual violence and objectification since childhood. The Czech director Motýlová courageously shares a fragmented chronicle of memories about her experience and the untold. In her own words, “the scenes are coloured in” by sexual violence victims by sharing their stories, but the film’s structure is porous, as is coming of age. Occasionally abrupt, from time to time interrupted, but sometimes also involuntarily endless.

Francisco Mira Godinho
Antigone or The Story of Sara Benoliel
Antígona, ou a História de Sara Benoliel
PT
2025, 20’, pt
Age 12+
Bernardo Lopes, Omaja

 

“A State for one man is no State at all” are the words from Sophocles’ Antigone. Sara has lost her brother to Covid–19. She wants nothing more than to say goodbye to her brother with a traditional burial that respects the Cape Verdean culture and grave site. In a world silenced and halted by the pandemic, the young woman connects with her community and memories.

The film’s title seemingly foretells: the burial of the brother is to be met with the death penalty. By playing with the elements of the Greek myth and its parallels with a not-so-distant past, the Portuguese director Godinho reflects on intimacy during bereavement and identity. When it seems that a part of us is lost, we reunite with our former self. Godinho is a director and screenwriter who has also studied North American culture, but RIGA IFF audiences will recognise him as the screenwriter of the award-winning short Dogs that Bark at the Birds (2019), which was screened in Riga.

Rosalie Charrier
Our Pantheons
Nos panthéons
FR
2025, 11’, fr
Age 7+
Khalid Tahhar, Romain Dumont, Partizan KTGB

 

11 brief minutes in the life of a young archaeologist. Suddenly, the excavation site is transformed into a shop window, and she – into a mannequin, reflecting the darkest and most inane side of society. A flirtatious middle-aged man. Jeering passersby. Even a group of tourists. Her workday turns into a nightmare, and the lyrics of a song, “if you’d only look at me,” take on a menacing tone. 

Charrier investigates the societal link with the gaze and its object. Specifically, by use of a genre – an acerbic comedy – the male gaze and its relationship with the object. Even if the film mostly assumes the point of view of the young woman, the archaeologist, it deftly steps into multiple other perspectives and accelerates the situation into a grotesque culmination. Charrier has studied contemporary literature, worked as a journalist, and created music videos – this is her debut short.

 

Di Zhang
Drifting, South
Nan Fang Pian Nan
CA, CN
2025, 19’, yue, cmn
Age 7+
Yizhi Fang

 

Heavy rain is expected tonight. In the bustling Xiaobei Road in Guangzhou, people run into each other only for a moment. A beauty salon worker who’s just been left by her husband, a dancer who wants to become a woman, and a migrant boy trying to change his life. The socially outcast strangers are brought together by a fireworks show.

 

Zhang’s piece is similar to the symphonic form of Anderson’s Magnolia (1999): our choices shape the fates of others. By leading us into the heated city, its crowds and melting pot, the Chinese director subtly portrays each character’s story and their journey against the current. In the words of the author, it’s a triptych on one reincarnation, one death, and one exile.

Elisabeth Subrin
Manal Issa, 2024
Manal Issa, 2024
US
2025, 10’, en
Age 7+
Lara Abou Saifan

 

“It’s a job that now requires to keep playing in real life,” Manal describes the profession of an actress. This time, she is in Beirut. Three years ago, she played the actress Maria Schneider, recreating the 1983 TV interview of Cinéma Cinémas. Now Manal responds to the same questions posed to Schneider 40 years ago. The short was made on 22 September 2024 – only a couple of hours before the country was bombed. 

The award-winning American director Subrin stages a recreation of Q&A from an even more radical angle – this time, through the chosen form she finds herself in a documentary, in conversation with the French-Lebanese actress Manal Issa. A couple of years ago, RIGA IFF screened the director’s short Maria Schneider, 1983 (2022), which recontextualised Schneider’s (1952–2011) experience during the filming of Last Tango in Paris (1972) – the infamous rape scene was a trauma that followed the actress until her last hour.