Jānis Šēnbergs

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.

Three relationships deconstructed. The Red Couple choose to pretend to be harmonious for the last three days of living together. The Green Couple's three days are full of uncertainty and nervousness, waiting for the other to reveal themselves intimately. The Yellow Couple, two colleagues, will lose themselves in the workplace romance genre trying not to fall in love.

Vilis is a 6 year old boy who lives between two time zones. In the morning he goes to a preschool in Riga, Latvia where he sings, draws, learns to read and plays. In the afternoon he is already a first grader, logging in the Zoom class in a New York public school. While most of the world is worried that school closures and remote learning during the pandemic has left kids without education, the pandemic has given Vilis a chance to study in two schools at once. Vilis’ mom has been documenting these weird times on her phone. The experience in both schools will be challenged when Vilis starts the first grade this fall for the second time in his hometown.

During Latvia’s centennial year, 15 filmmakers created each his own film portrait of a person living in Latvia on the background of centenary events. Documentary 2018 combines these stories into a unique poetic vision based on analogy with the documentary 235 000 000, a classic of the Riga school of poetic documentary cinema. This film is an attempt to make sure whether the codes of the poetic cinema are still relevant and accessible today.

Annia (28) lives in Riga and always is in a process and finding her own way, expressing herself in multiple roles. She works as a show manager at The New Riga Theatre, but later she needs to find out how to be unemployed. She teaches tap dance in her own studio, and a great part of her life is to be Dr. Clown in Children's clinical hospital.

“One Of Us” follows Latvia-born athletes – wrestler Anastasija Grigorjeva, veteran gymnast Igors Vihrovs, and up-and-coming figure skater Deniss Vasiļjevs. Being of non-Latvian ethnicity, they are sometimes treated as ‘others’ by native Latvians, who welcome them into their ranks only when they’ve shown astonishing results.

Accomplished European scenographer and educator Andris Freibergs paints a self-portrait by shaping the stage for an imaginary production titled “Andris Freibergs”. He transforms himself into a space that contains close to eighty years worth of stunning success, tragic loss, birth and death. It is an attempt to create the perfect empty space – one that would simultaneously encompass everything and nothing, the beginning and the end.

This film represents a figurative view on the developments of contemporary art in Latvian modern environment by following the path of a piece of art to the audience for a certain period of time and by finding a unified system of characters in the process. One piece of art is advancing the story on the background of a previous piece, the next one is continuing it in another direction just like in a movie two shots alongside create the third one and result in another modern art object – film.