Andris Grants

Emotionally charged story about three women standing against male dominated church preventing them from following their calling to serve God and their communities. Protestan female ministers who wish to serve God, the Church and people as pastors in today’s Latvia can only do that under the wing of foreign churches. Latvia is the only country in the world whose official Lutheran church has banned ordination of women after successfully practicing it for two decades. While some of the women ministers, refusing to accept this, leave the country to build lives as fully-fledged pastors elsewhere in the world, others carry on serving as second-rate assistants or other church workers. However, today there are female theologians who are ready to fight for a future in more equal society thus ending the discrimination based on ‘other sex’ or ‘wrong’ gender. The road towards changes leads through frustrations, confidence and doubts, obedience and rebellion.

Anastasia is 13 and her sister Diana is 11. The two sisters live in a Latvian orphanage. When they find out that an American family is ready to adopt them, Diana cannot wait to move to the States, while Anastasia is less excited about the idea of leaving her home.

A gang of five children spend their summer in an abandoned factory complex. When they are forbidden to go there by the factory owner for safety reasons, the children decide to ignore the ban. This decision changes their lives forever and the friends face a grim confrontation.

New performers have recently moved into the 130-year-old building of the Riga Circus. Having built a stage in the stables, actors Ance, Āris, Klāvs, Reinis and the other members of the theatre company Kvadrifrons are reinvigorating and preserving the tradition of live art in the circus. The name of the group is an acronym in Latvian that conveys their ethos: they are an organisation that can chill with their friends, have bursts of amazing creativity, and whose members are far from unintelligent. And all the while, the strong smell of elephants wafts through the building. Here and there, the life of the previous inhabitants makes itself known. Soon shamanistic rituals alternate with clowning around, fortune-telling with illusion juggling, stagecraft with personal choices. Then suddenly, out of Nothing… emerges Theatre.

An ageing theatre star struggles with her mental condition and pending diagnosis, while preparing for a role. With the premiere approaching, she balances between acceptance and self denial, while losing grip on reality.

Līgatne river ferry crossing takes locals, tourists, passers-by and cars from early spring to the fall over river Gauja. It's the last of what were once many such 'rope ferries' across Gauja, but it remains more than an historical oddity and plays an important part in many lives. At just 12 square meters, the wooden ferry nevertheless encompasses an intriguing and sometimes surprising selection of what constitutes 21st-century Latvia.

The film documents the production of Anna Ķirse’s contemporary opera in the forests of Finland.

Vārdotājas (Wordsmiths) traces the recent rise of women's stand-up comedy in Latvia, but it is by no means just for laughs. Feelings of discomfort, shame, shock, are just some of the subjects tackled.

“Inga Can Hear” is a story about the 15-year old Inga, a girl caught between two worlds. Being the only hearing member of a deaf family residing in the remote Latvian countryside, Inga has been the family’s interpreter in the hearing world since the age of seven. Her role in the family has forced her to grow up very quickly and her personality fluctuates between a responsible young woman and a moody teenager. Inga is about to graduate from middle school and has to make a decision on what to do next. Inga’s head is full of questions. To pursue a career as an actress? To become a firefighter? What will happen to the family, for whom she has sometimes been the only link to the outside world?

Riga in the 30s. Wild bohemian lifestyle is the name of the game for every artist worth his salt. A young man from the countryside, poor but ambitious, arrives in the capital, where he hopes to make his mark in the artistic circles. What follows is a string of events, fraught with confusion and misunderstanding, hilarious and heart-warming at the same time.

A psychological thriller about a middle-aged intellectual who, in an attempt to restore his reputation in his wife’s eyes, accidentally commits a murder. As time passes, he begins to see a link between the deceased, his wife’s pregnancy and the mysterious blackmailer who is forcing him to act against his will.

In April 1969 Ilya (Eliyahu) Rips, then a young student of mathematics, tried to burn himself in a public square in Riga, Latvia protesting against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He was stopped and eventually sent to a psychiatric hospital for two years. Thanks to international pressure from the mathematical community in 1972 he was allowed to emigrate to Israel. Now he is considered one of the most brilliant mathematicians in the world. At the same time, for most people familiar with his name, Rips is first of all associated with the development of the so called Bible Code – a mathematical program allegedly helping to decipher hidden messages encoded in Torah – the Five Books of Moses. He is attacked by both the scientific and religious community, yet his research continues.

Lords of Riga allows to see an insight into a passionate subculture of bike couriers. Weaving their way through the urban traffic, they have become silent and sometimes unnoticed witnesses of everyday life in Riga as well as examples of our modern-day society. What is freedom to this bunch of rebellious messengers and where it ends?

Lonely, 45 year-old worker Kasandra has just received a lethal diagnosis from her doctor. She goes to her high school reunion, confused, and is faced with phantasmagorical events that completely shatter her daily routine. Kasandra flees from the city. In the forest, she is engulfed by a river and brought to a secluded sea shore. Alone and over time Kasandra experiences an unusual healing and rebirth.

A business executive lays off hundreds of harbor workers after they go on strike. He and his wife plan to escape the stress by taking an Italian vacation. On the evening before the trip, one of the fired workers, dressed in an orange harbor worker safety jacket, slips into their home. Although his immediate actions reveal a murderous intent, revenge is only the initial step.

They met on Christmas Eve, beyond one's usual living-space: at the morgue. In an outburst of feelings, they try to manipulate each other in order to get what they want. She wants him, but he wants to vanish – following the rules of black comedy, neither one of them will get anything.

The story of three different cultures meeting together in the realm of ethno-jazz music. Georgian ethno-jazz trio The Shin, the Moldavian band Trigon, Owl’s Ethnographic Orchestra and Intars Busulis. Their breath-taking journey into the souls of Georgian, Latvian and Moldavian folk music, their creation of contemporary music akin to cutting shiny new gemstones from rough old folklore treasures, opening hearts and removing borders between nations and languages. In their travels they become brothers and sisters in music. The scenery and melodies, voices and rhythms on the road they take may change. Yet in the end it turns out to be the way home for them all. The Way Home.

It is nice and fun to have a cat or some other pet at home to play with. The trusting cat also thought to himself: it's so great to have a home... Until the moment it found itself trapped in a bag, somewhere out on the street, all alone, left to it's faith. Nevertheless - all is well that ends well!

Baltic German Alice Fon Trota returns to her father’s manor in Latvia in 1919 to sell it and start new life. She meets hostile resistance of local workers and discovers she has been lured into a carefully tailored trap, organized by demonic lawyer Emil Keizerling, decadent underground organization “Viva La Mort” and its necrophile leader Zība Falstaff. They plan to manipulate with Alice, who has received good education in France but also had suffered severe physical traumas. Knowing that her deepest desire is to carry out her unexpressed creative talents, they want to use her potential for their demoniacal purposes that regard the future of Latvia. While escaping the clutches of her “helpers”, she meets Latvian silent cinema enthusiasts. While being with them and working with cinematograph, she learns to use it as a self-discovery tool, as a weapon of confrontation of her enemies and as a way to transform her healing wounds by creating masterpiece of silent cinema.