Baltic Frames Aarhus
The Baltic documentary festival in Aarhus, in the wonderful art house cinema Øst for Paradis (”East of Eden”) took off saturday with a full house screening of the classic ”Ten Minutes Older” by Herz Frank and Lithuanian Giedre Zickyte’s ”Master and Tatyana”. Sunday a seminar entitled ”Poetic Baltic Documentaries in a Contemporary Perspective” was held with Pille Rünk, Giedre Zickyte and Uldis Cekulis as speakers – I had the pleasure of being the moderator of the two hour talk that circled around the theme of ”Conversing with the Soviet Past” the theme of all the films in the festival. Zickyte’s film is mentioned, later on the sunday brought to screen Peteris Krilovs film on Gustav Klucis and Martti Helde’s impressive ”In the Crosswind” that ran in Danish cinemas November last year.
Today, monday, two films were screened, Zickyte’s ”How We Played the Revolution” and Estonian ”The Russians on Crow Island” by Sulev Keedus – tuesday Latvian Viesturs Kairiss is on screen with his Tjernobyl film, ”The Invisible City”.
It is the plan of the main organizer, The Danish Cultural Institute, to continue the festival next year, where Aarhus is one of the European Capitals.
Photo: From the left the curators Niels Bjørn Wied and Signe van Zundert, Head of the Danish Cultural Institute in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania Simon Drewsen Holmberg, Estonian film producer Pille Rünk, Lithuanian director Giedre Zickyte and Latvian producer Uldis Cekulis.