RIGA IFF: Īsfilmu nacionālā konkursa skate

Ildze Felsberga
Where Does the Sun Sleep at Night?
Kur saulīte nakti guļ?
LV
2024, 23’, lv
Age 12+
Dārta Krāsone, Daiga Livčāne, National Film School of the Latvian Academy of Culture

 

Your hair is grey. Your walls are grey. Everything you are is grey. And then there’s the struggle over the quarterly budget cuts. As the lift glides up and down, we enter the corporate limbo, accompanied by a choir of accountants. In 14 scenes and 14 rituals, an unnamed company and its grey employees move through songs, water cooler lines and the legs of a black rooster. And at a dream job interview, an important question will come up: “Where does the sun sleep at night?”

 

It’s as if the creator of The Office, Ricky Gervais, and Roy Andersson read some Latvian folk songs, discovered the Song Festival tradition and came together to inspire this office sitcom, rendered in asphalt tones with post-folk elements. Felsberga’s thesis film is a formally sound and compelling exploration of the space between the slumber of consciousness and existential farce. By assembling well-known actors and professionals on screen, it brings to life a world filled with deadpan humor, absurdity and the omnipresence of printers.

Mersedese Margoite, Imants Daksis
Cave Man
Alu cilvēks
LV
2025, 10’, lv
Age 12+
Mersedese Margoit, Imants Daksis, I+M Productions 

 

The primordial world and its creation manifest in abstract movement and imagery. A being emerges from the darkest depths of the earth. It watches the skies, carves history into stone, cradles seashells and foretells that which we have long known. Who are the strange guests it awaits? Could it be us?

 

Created by Margoite and Daksis, this oneiric and tumultuous visual meditation on the first human is a Dadaist play with time and history. Photo and video artist Margoite’s short film The Silva Method (2023) was screened in the National Short Film Competition at RIGA IFF. It can confidently be said that Margoite is a kind of Baltic Germaine Dulac, reflecting in her latest work the motifs and characters of Dulac’s emblematic film The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928).

Arnis Kalniņš 
The Observer
Vērotājs
LV
2025, 18’, lv
Age 12+
Grēta Grebže, Nadīna Anna Larionova, Daiga Livčāne, Jānis Ābele, Latvijas Kultūras akadēmijas Nacionālā Filmu skola, Chaland Films

 

People don’t want to see their faces as they are – they prefer the ideal. So asserts the untamable Juris Kalniņš, as he presents his photographic archives and lifetime of work to the camera. For most of his life, he has been capturing images of his fellow artists, his time and ordinary people on the streets. Now, he has turned to drone aerial photography. Having obtained the perspective of the all-seeing eye, the film’s protagonist returns to his father’s gravesite and digs a hole…

 

With care and subtlety, Arnis Kalniņš, who once studied sociology, turns his lens on his father’s portrait. Moving from scene to scene and deliberately steering clear of conventional biographical film clichés, he has put together a contextual and intimate collage of life, family history, resistance during the Soviet occupation, and memories that can only be hummed. The film brushes against the war in Ukraine, giving voice to shared experiences through song.

Žanete Skarule, Tomass Vengris
Big Loop Small Loop
Lielais aplis – mazais aplis
LV, LT
2025, 16’, lv, lt, ru
Age 12+
Rūta Petronaite, Dominks Jarmakovičs, Smart Casual, Studio Locomotive

 

The 1970s in the Baltic states. During the years of Soviet stagnation, the young architecture student Pauļus is acutely aware of what can and cannot be said or done. When he is chosen to represent the Soviet Union abroad, he feels the space for maneuver shrinking around him. Entering the cruising circles, Pauļus begins to explore the freedoms afforded by the cover of night. And suddenly, the boundaries seem to open up…

 

Turning their attention to the little-known queer community in Latvia under the Soviet regime, creative and life partners – Latvian director Skarule and Lithuanian filmmaker Vengris – reflect on the “double life” of oppressed and repressed homosexuals. Drawing on the idea of life’s performativity through Goya’s gothic angels and demons, they have crafted a finely honed feature film within its genre. As the filmmakers explain, the film examines “the outer life we show to the world and the inner life we keep to ourselves. The more repressive our society, the further apart these two worlds drift.” The film’s world premiere will take took place at the Kyiv International Short Film Festival.

Andrejs Brīvulis
Cleanliness
Tīrība
LV
2025, 5’, lv
Age 12+
Emma Daniela Grāpe, Andrejs Brīvulis, Art Academy of Latvia

 

8:55. You’re standing in the bathtub, lathering your crotch. Down your thighs runs the new, improved fruit concentrate of active ingredients and the pubic hair smells of apples. The phone has been buzzing all morning, gradually sketching the silhouette of the day. Parameters, requests, the address – somewhere only hell knows. The office worker’s day continues, a daily poetry of latex condoms and a partner who is a depressed alcoholic.

 

Humoresque is a genre rarely attempted in Latvian cinema but the animation director, together with poet Kārlis Vērdiņš, has brought it to new heights. A playful poem, which premiered at Annecy, about a member of the queer community, with their on-screen diary unfolding in pastel tones and cartoon-like scenes. Though the “butt” of the story is rather bitter, the film’s hyper-real and nonchalant tone makes you want to add it to your Google calendar.

Dāvis Gauja
Centre of The Spiral
Spirāles centrs
LV
2025, 29’, lv
Age 12+
Līva Vernere, VFS Films, Latvijas Kultūras akadēmijas Nacionālā Filmu skola

A walk to the pond. An event. Approaching the pond. Kiril’s mind moves in circles – always in circles. He enjoys a sun-filled day, swimming, chatting and getting inebriated with his friends, until blood seeps into the idyll. His girlfriend Celeste’s injury shatters his sense of time and space – consciousness itself becomes elusive. Where do the events involving Kiril and his friends truly begin? And did they ever actually reach the pond…

Gauja, one of the most promising Latvian film directors, misleads, disorients and intrigues with this modular narrative. Creating elliptical, time-bending distortions in a story about “limits of control,” the film brings together a new generation of Latvian artists on screen – Klāvs Kristaps Košins, Artūrs Čukurs, Elīza Dombrovska and others. In the director’s own words, “We hold our identities with great care. We polish, construct and we perform them. It is very important for ourselves, it is our foundation. But then sudden trauma or substance intoxication dissolves everything.” The film has been nominated for the National Film Award of Latvia award for Best Student Film.