Dāvis Sīmanis Jr.

Death as non-existence, non-being, or the absence of life has been a subject of human interest for millennia. Poets, philosophers, prophets, and hermits have now been replaced by filmmakers, influencers, cryonicists, and evolutionary biologists in the search for the quintessence of life and death. Zoltan Istvan runs a cryonics laboratory and is running for president of the United States with the demand that immortality be included among fundamental human rights. In Russia, a mass festival dedicated to the cult of death is traditionally held. Dāvis Sīmanis' film essay reveals the twists and turns of man's age-old desire for eternal life. It uncovers the metaphorical and fetishistic representations of death and the mechanisms by which we come to terms with our own mortality.

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In 1937, silent film star Maria Leiko travels to USSR upon learning of the birth of her granddaughter. But when she discovers the tragic circumstances of that event, KGB agents persuade her to remain in the country. Leiko abandons her cinema career to instead join Skatuve, the Latvian State Theatre in Moscow. Soon she discovers that she is being manipulated by the government amid its purges of political enemies. As a network of traitors, informers, and NKVD agents surround her, she must choose between family and career, and between her ideals and the lies of Stalin’s totalitarian regime.

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A miniseries about the events during one summer in a family of a writer who are unexpectedly granted a remote estate with all its unusual inhabitants, and who has to decide what to do with the dilapidated estate. Exciting and comic events in eight episodes in which the future writer Anšlavs Eglītis together with his brother Vidvuds, father Viktors and his wife Hilda Vīka, begin the restoration of the estate, at the same time opening a boarding house, which becomes the intersection and summer stage of the neighbourhood, ghosts of the past, visitors from the city and Latvian intellectuals in Latvia in the 1920s.

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Stylized as silent cinema, the film connects political and philosophical extremes of 1913 in a story of a young man participating at the creation of a new world. This mysterious adventurer, who was known as Peter the Lett, gets involved in a tragicomic and surreal race from a routine clerk job and a romantic passion in Riga to preparation of the world revolution in Vienna, psychoanalysis at Freud’s salon and seduction of Mata Hari in Paris.

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A story about Emīlija Benjamiņa, the “queen of the press” in interwar Latvia, whose wealth and tragic fate have since become folklore. The film’s narrative covers the period from the beginnings of Emīlija’s magazine Atpūta (Recreation), to her arrest and slow demise in a train en route to Siberia. The most prominent clairvoyant of the time - Eugene Fink’s prophecy that Emīlija would die from starvation in a foreign land (which served to be true) weaves through the narrative as a red thread. With this strong woman at the centre of the story, the film shows Latvian society in all its richness and gives the audience the opportunity to meet many well-known historical figures.

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A journey into the complex world of today, full of hopes, desires, and fears for the present. The film invites us to follow a voice whose thoughts and doubts about the present become a meditation accompanied by works of art. The film features all the artworks exhibited at the second Riga Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA2). Reminiscent of a Tarkovskyan dystopia, the united ecosystem of living nature, a disused power plant, an abandoned paintball field, warehouses, flocks of birds, cruise ships and railway tracks, makes the film’s space its own metaphor for the collapse of Soviet ideals and capitalist hopes.

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Žanis Lipke, an ordinary blue-collar worker in Latvia, embarks on a covert operation. Despite his family’s hardship under successive Soviet and German occupations, Lipke tries to save local Jews from Nazi persecution and certain death, moving them from the Riga ghetto to an underground bunker hidden on his property.

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1940. On the border between Latvia and the USSR, a woman is killed in front of her house as she tried to protect her son from the liberating attack of the Soviets. Almost 80 years later, the archive photo bearing witness to this news item and representing a collateral victim of the European Union’s founding conflict forms the starting point for a journey undertaken by Davis Sīmanis. He navigates from one side to the other of this border, which today represents another separation, one that is geographical but also cultural: between Europe and Russia.

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In the final years of World War I a retired German field medic is sent to a remote sanatorium for soldiers suffering from post-traumatic mental disorders. There he encounters a strange, dreamlike state of existence that challenges his own war-torn mind.

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The film is based on true events, it tells the stories of two outstanding personalities of the 20th century – Sergei Eisenstein and Isaiah Berlin, who were both born and spent their childhood in Riga but soon had to leave the city. The film follows the lives of the two characters during the turbulent first half of the 20th century, telling how one of them becomes “the greatest film director of his generation” in the totalitarian Soviet Union, and the other “the greatest thinker of his generation” in liberal Great Britain.

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This documentary deals with faith, human aging, a struggle to fulfill your vision and above all - one particular building. In its poetical minimalism the film observes the construction of the new Latvian National Library, which has become a metaphor for a temple, a boiling-point for an entire nation.

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Composers are regular people – they drive public transport, do sports, pay their bills. And still – they are very different as they are able to comprehend sound. The documentary film Sounds Under the Sun is an inspiring cinematic journey all over the world to meet some of the world-famous contemporary classical music composers. Visiting Alaskan forests, skyscrapers in Tokyo, and war zone in Georgia, the film gives a glimpse of how the composers share their struggle to create music from the moment of sonic creation till the moment when their music is interpreted for public (the film features composers Sir John Tavener from the UK, Leonid Desyatnikov from Russia, Giya Kancheli from Georgia, Dobrinka Tabakova from Bulgaria, John Luther Adams from the USA, and Ko Matsushita from Japan, and one of the world’s best youth choirs, Kamēr..., from Latvia).

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The documentary draws a portrait of an opera director who is staging Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre. He is torn between the tragicomic routine of an opera house and his own perception of Wagner and the Ring cycle. The film witnesses the director’s drama in maintaining the fragile link between a well-constructed performance and his own vision that lies within the music and the narrative, and is seen as German expressionism-like nightmares.

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To touch the paper, to hear the sound of the pencil and to always trace himself - those are the rules of Latvian artist, Ilmārs Blumbergs. The story of a man who does not create art for around or within, but has instead made it a constant state of being.

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Ten years ago the Latvian National Opera was reopened after an immense reconstruction. Now this is the place where artists and the stage come together in an unusual atmosphere to create “the miracle” of music, action, text – elements of the opera phenomenon.

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Alex is a perfectly ordinary young man whose life changes radically after receiving a strange message and meeting several strange characters who seem to have stepped out of the world of cinema. Under the influence of Zenon's paradox, Alex begins to see the world differently and discovers unusual abilities.

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With the eyes of ordinary people, Adreses explore successful and less successful or even scandalous examples of architecture and environment building. Martins Kibilds goes to two places or addresses, every time taking a different person with him – without professional experience in architecture, but with a keen desire to explore, think and share impressions with the audience.

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In 1937, silent film star Maria Leiko travels to USSR upon learning of the birth of her granddaughter. But when she discovers the tragic circumstances of that event, KGB agents persuade her to remain in the country. Leiko abandons her cinema career to instead join Skatuve, the Latvian State Theatre in Moscow. Soon she discovers that she is being manipulated by the government amid its purges of political enemies. As a network of traitors, informers, and NKVD agents surround her, she must choose between family and career, and between her ideals and the lies of Stalin’s totalitarian regime.

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A laid-back journey in search of one of the world’s most fascinating families, observed and examined from within its most intimate relationships, where the truth and depth of a memoir meet the ironic tone of an indie comedy.

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Stylized as silent cinema, the film connects political and philosophical extremes of 1913 in a story of a young man participating at the creation of a new world. This mysterious adventurer, who was known as Peter the Lett, gets involved in a tragicomic and surreal race from a routine clerk job and a romantic passion in Riga to preparation of the world revolution in Vienna, psychoanalysis at Freud’s salon and seduction of Mata Hari in Paris.

Open details →

Žanis Lipke, an ordinary blue-collar worker in Latvia, embarks on a covert operation. Despite his family’s hardship under successive Soviet and German occupations, Lipke tries to save local Jews from Nazi persecution and certain death, moving them from the Riga ghetto to an underground bunker hidden on his property.

Open details →