Dina Kuple

One of the iconic Latvian movies. Based on Astrid Lindgren's book 'Emil of Lönneberga'. A story of a little boy, Emil, who, according to others is incredibly naughty, but actually Emil is a lot more kind hearted than all the rest. And everything he does is to help someone. But somehow it all the time turns out like a prank. His family won't agree with any pranks on themselves, so there goes Emil in his father's tool shed, where he's locked up for every prank. Includes the phrase - 'the main idea is to keep your feet warm', which has been adapted in Latvian culture, so it's already a saying.

Poor countryside girl Elza has been unsuccessfully looking for a job in Riga before she gets help from an acquantance. After that, fortune seems to turn and rich aged factory owner Ķikulis wants to marry Elza. Reluctant at first, she finally agrees but the marriage doesn't got smoothly.

Austra arrives to a small Latvian town to work for a state institution and faces disinterest and carelessness from her colleagues. Her other troubles include a difficult relationship with her daughter and a sudden falling in love.

The son of Martins Viksna, the collective farm chairman, Klavs comes home from the military service and starts working in his native kolkhoz but does not understand his colleagues, so he goes to town.

The hard work plays an important role in the personal growth of a runner.

Cezars Kalnins, portrayed by "Latvian Harrison Ford” Uldis Pucitis, installs telephones by day and composes pop songs by night. The puritan Soviet censorship deems Cezars’s lyrics "unsuitable and frivolous” and "unfit for the Soviet youth”. In fact, it can be argued that this assessment matches the opinion of the Soviet cinema authorities in regard to this film as a whole, since "Four White Shirts” was immediately banned and released in cinemas only in 1986. The creative boldness and stubbornness, evident in both Cezars’s bitingly ironic verses and the film’s unconventional narrative structure and fresh, new-wave-inspired mode of expression, turned out to be equally problematic for the hero and for the film itself, as well as for its director whose representation of the actual mechanisms of Soviet censorship ended up too realistic for his own good.