Baltic Sea Docs 2014/ 1
I am sitting on the 11th floor of Hotel Albert in Riga. We are into the third day of the workshop that preceeds the pitching of the weekend. 22 projects will be presented after two days of intense discussions of the projects. Today is the day where the filmmakers take their time to make the final adjustments of the verbal/visual presentation including the re-editing of trailers where they have had the chance to get assistance from Swedish/Canadian editor Phil Jandaly.
Everything has been – as always – perfectly organised by Lelda Ozola and Zanda Dudina from the Film Centre, and the weather has been superb. I am looking at the churches of Riga and at the new National Library that we had the possibility to see from inside the other day. It is magnificent, wow to be a student sitting in one of the many reading rooms with a view to Daugava river and the skyline of the Latvian capital.
Riga is the Cultural Capital of Europe and the film activity is influenced by this. Tonight I am to watch ”Across the Roads, Across the River”, the omnibus film about Riga with short films by the directors Sergei Loznitsa (Ukraine), Audrius Stonys (Lithuania), Rainer Komers (Germany), Bettina Henkel (Austria), Jaak Kilmi (Estonia), Jon Bang Carlsen (Denmark) and Ivars Seleckis (Latvia). Before the screening I will have the pleasure to meet with Seleckis, the grand old man of Latvian documentary cinema, soon to be 80 years old. The reason is that he is the obvious Latvian choice to be part of the film about the masters of the poetic cinema in the Baltic countries. Seleckis is the man behind the trilogy from the Crossroad Street among many many films he has made about Latvian history and culture. On a personal level I owe to Seleckis that he was the first to take me and my wife on a tour round Latvia to see the beauty of the country.
The producer behind the film on the Baltic poetic documentary cinema is Uldis Cekulis. On the photo you see him relax outside the rooms in the farmhouse where we stayed on the island of Manija in Estonia, when visiting Mark Soosaar. Cekulis was the cameraman on the research trip.