Mārtiņš Jurēvics

Standing near the reptile section in a zoo for 26 minutes we can learn a lot about the animals on both sides of the separating glass.

In order to preserve Latvian traditions in Australia, it is necessary to want to live with them on a daily basis. This film preserves the memory of the rich traditions of the Australian Latvian Arts Festival and delves into the complexities of what it means to be an Australian Latvian.

Katrīna is a typical city dweller who has lived in Mangaļsala all her life, but she has a less than typical passion. On one hand, Katrīna is a rational, young and well-educated professional, but on the other – an irresponsible child of nature, who keeps a dog, two cats and two horses in her limited urban space.

Elīna returns to the summer house of her childhood to show it to buyers. The visceral presence of her dead grandmother forces her to reflect on the legacy of failing familial relations – and how she and her mother are approaching a similar fate.

The film focuses around Ina and Nikoloz, eleven and ten years old Georgian children who live in the 2008 Georgia-Russia war refugee village Tserovani. Unlike troubled adults who long for their old homes, the children are oblivious of the past. As they find fun and scary pastimes around the village, they try to reconstruct memories of their past, of where they came from. They don’t remember the war, but it continues to affect their present and future.

A young woman on a train. The same young woman in an old house peeling potatoes, or hanging the laundry out to dry. She's alone but not for long. Potential buyers infiltrate the peace and serenity that surround both the house and the protagonist. The images tell the story and with the little information we get, we know just enough.

After reuniting with his first mentor Bruno and receiving his latest mission, an exiled Ciro is left to fearlessly confront whatever comes his way, navigating a new chapter of gang warfare while grappling with devastating memories of loss and trauma. Weaving between his past as an orphan in Naples' cruel underworld and present as a hardened, cunning assassin with nothing left to lose, Ciro is plunged into the cold, dark depths of a world where immortality is just another form of damnation.

"If a person doesn't go to church anymore, then the church should go to them," says Rinalds, a calm, smiling, young man with a good sense of humor. He is a priest from a small village in Latgale, Latvia's easternmost and poorest region, and the documentary Prīsters (The Priest) follows the routines of his daily life, his thoughts of life and religion and why he chose this path for himself.

Unable to deal with a personal crisis, Gatis is struggling with depression. He feels like he is burning out. By accident he ends up in a strange cult-type therapy group that seems to trigger his self healing process, though it feels like he is losing his sanity. Is he healing or going insane?

In the minds of people, Brussels is no longer a geographical location; it is now a myth-surrounded centre, where decisions are made regarding future life in Europe. The most brilliant minds from the European countries have convened in Brussels: former state leaders, highly-placed officials, advisors, translators and interpreters, as well as family members of all these people. Together, they comprise a sort of separate planet ruled by special laws and using new methods of communication; it is a place of a high concentration of power and all sorts of creature comforts. The anxiety following the 2016 attacks on Brussels has taken everyone by surprise, and the question whether to stay on Planet Brussels now comes up increasingly often. The Brexit news gave completely different kind of concussion to the commonly established center of Europe.

A family film about an adventure of kids discovering and safeguarding the mystery of an old garden.

Project: Moving sees a young professional explore and debate the trend of young people leaving Rīga for somewhere more suitable for living, particularly the town of Cēsis in the scenic Vidzeme region. "We are simply showing that right now Cēsis has become the hipster capital, and it's not bad at all. It's like a different kind of gentrification, and it affects not just a single quarter, but the entire town."

Eva – a beautiful, but meek young woman – arrives at an isolated country house where her husband Robert is lying in a coma recovering from injuries sustained in a mysterious accident in which they lost their apartment. Soon strange things start happening around the house and Eva becomes convinced that Robert is not actually unconscious and is out to harm her.

Harry Berzins is abducted by aliens. Traumatic experience gained is on a foreign planet, where the gray race rules and makes Berzins feel excluded. The only creature he believes is the odd Ufologist Vilma Kavace. While Vilma uses Berzins as an alien attraction bait, his mother, impregnated with a Latvian sperm on another planet, carries his child. Shieet.

“Under the Upturned Moon” is a documentary that tells an outstandingly gripping story of two journalists investigating the depths of Islamic community in a country as small and seemingly insignificant as Latvia.

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 deepens, he becomes a witness to her murder.

Maija is a young and ambitious journalist who wants to do something that no other journalist has dared. In order to conduct a groundbreaking research on Daesh, she pretends to be an Islamic convert and tries to join them.

A cinephile father and his son travel by car through Latvian countryside while trying to sell an antique piece of furniture in order to fund the son’s endeavour in filmmaking. The father dreams about his son’s future in film business, but his son has different plans for the future.

In this film a young man and his curmudgeonly grandfather are going 1,800 km to northern Russia in an old Zhiguli car, hoping to find the grave of their great-grandfather, who was deported. The grandfather Andris is sceptic over the lofty quest, initiated by his grand-son, as it’s not known what awaits them at their destination. Andris thinks they won’t find anything and will come back to Latvia without ever learning what happened to his father. However ever-optimistic Kārlis wants to use the journey not only to find answers about the past but also become closer to his grandfather who raised him. They both lost their parents as children.

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.

A coming-of-age drama about a teenage girl who lives through the break-up of her family and her friend’s suicide. The script is based on the diaries of a real high-school senior year student (also the scriptwriter of the film), who wrote about her experiences in 2018-2019.