Viesturs Kairišs

17-year-old Ria is a sensitive and mysterious young woman. Ria's mother has suffered in a car accident and has stopped speaking since her daughter's birth. The family grows deer for sale, yet, the business is not successful. To earn some money, her father decides ...  (more)

A tale about a nine-year old boy's relationship with the world around him, shot in one of Latvia's poorest and most beautiful regions - Latgale  (more)

Latgale is a land on the very eastern edge of the European Union. Sometimes it seems like a land in the middle of a body of water. At other times, it seems a desert with the ark of rescued humanity all covered by sand. The film presents a land that is made by ...  (more)

The 14th of June 1941, Soviet-occupied Latvia: Without warning, the authorities break into the house of Melanie and her husband Aleksandr and force them to leave everything behind. Together with more than 15 000 Latvians, Melanie and her son get deported to Siberia ...  (more)

A story about a city built as a paradise but turned into hell – a city slowly turning into paradise again, just in a different way. Igor has been living in the Chernobyl Zone for almost ten years, for peace and a chance to escape modern civilization. Psychological ...  (more)

A Latvian tragicomedy about a young artist who bears witness to the dramatic political upheavals of the WWII era. As brutal regimes come and go, his country, his village, his people, and even his heart are swept up in the inexorable currents of history.  (more)

Wedding rituals and a love triangle.  (more)

A creative a portrait of Latvian luger and Olympic medal winner, Martins Rubenis, who won the first Latvia's Winter Olympic medal of the games in Turin in 2006. Apart from his success in sports, in the circles of contemporary alternative culture he is known as DJ ...  (more)

A tragicomic tale about the relationship of Guna and the twice older writer Gints. Guna has lost her job, but Gints hasn’t written anything in years. Whilst running away from an unsatisfactory relationship and the lack of creative self-expression, Guna gets ...  (more)

An emotional and stylistically consistent documentary musical depicting the staging of Bernstein’s West Side Story with deaf youths. The dramatic material is intertwined with life and the emotional scenes of the musical; it creates a distinctive choreography, which ...  (more)

Viesturs Kairišs’ 2004 documentary The Monument investigates the interpretation of Riga’s Soviet Second World War memorial in the post-Soviet era. The "Victory Monument" was established by the Soviets to celebrate freeing Latvia from Nazi Germany. However, for ...  (more)

“As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relationships with this best and truest friend of mankind that death's image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed ...  (more)

An omnibus film consisting of ten parts, each directed by a different young director from the Latvian Academy of Culture. The unifying element of the ten shorts is the place where they take place - the airport. A lot can happen there - including a strike by a comet ...  (more)

It is 1991 in Latvia and nineteen-year-old aspiring cinematographer Jazis’s whole world is thrown into chaos as he is dragged into the people’s peaceful protests against the Soviet Army’s attempted takeover of power in his country.  (more)