Baiba Urbāne

Some of the most iconic images in Latvian visual history were taken 30 years ago, when the so-called Singing Revolution took place. This documentary that includes well-known and previously unseen 35 mm footage, is about those who took these shots, told in their own voices, their own emotions and memories.

This is the 3rd film in almost 30 years about the daily lives of the people living in this small street of Pārdaugava. We first met them in the late 1980s when the Soviet Union was on the brink of collapse. We visited them again in the wild 1990s. And now we meet them in 2013, again in a whole different world.

Latvian scientists – archaeologists, radar and photogrammetry specialists, architects, geologists, historians, computer programmers and others, banded together to create a unique technology for exploring archaeological sites, and made a sensational find in 2007. In the oldest stone building in the world – Egypt’s Pyramid of Djoser – the Latvian scientific expedition discovered new underground rooms and a network of galleries. This new information has forced a revaluation of previous assumptions about the role and function of pyramids.

Using previously unpublished footage shot by amateurs in the era of 8 mm cameras, the film is about the simple human life of those who lived in the Soviet Latvia from 1940 until 1991, a time when a double-moral reigned in society.

The fates of the students involved in the Latvian educational system reforms and that of their teacher – the screenwriter and film director, Tālivaldis Margēvičs, are unusually intertwined. This leads to thoughts on various, current integration problems and on universal human values.

The protogonist of this documentary is Victoria - a lady who's become a person who provides emotional support to a multitude of children in her neighbourhood.

Ten years have passed since we made the film “Crossroad Street”, about a small street in the suburbs of the city of Riga. Now we’ve come back. Perhaps it was a sense of duty, perhaps nostalgia that brought us back – who knows? Perhaps it was both. Daiga, Aldis, Osis – they’re all our people. The first film had an impact on both the filmmakers and the residents of Crossroad Street. We found friends whom we want to meet again and again. Society has become more prosperous, several value systems coexist side-by-side. People often live in these systems as though they were in different worlds that never meet. We felt that the world inhabited by our people is sinking into oblivion, and so we wanted to show that it still has its own turbulence, that Crossroad Street resembles Latvia’s palm – the place where a fortune teller can see the lines of its destiny.