Filmed over seven years, this documentary tells the story of an award-winning utopian architectural installation at the top of the sacred Songshan mountain in China. Designed by a Latvian architect Austris Mailītis and commissioned by a Chinese investor Mr. Zhu, who, despite the language barrier, become the best companions in creating the World’s first open-air building for flying performance. The film reveals the investor's attempt to build an architectural wonder according to Western standards, while the architect seeks to embody the values of Eastern philosophy by inviting monks from the nearby world-famous Shaolin Monastery to participate in flying performances. As the construction of the object begins, the architect and the investor themselves have to levitate between their cultural differences, conventions and personal ambitions.

SCREENINGS:
2020
Architecture Design Art Film Festival (Palm Springs, U.S.)
2019
ArchFilmLund - Lund Architecture Film Festival (Lund, Sweden)
ARQUITETURAS Film Festival (Lisbon, Portugal)
Bend Design Conference (Bend, U.S.)
BY DESIGN - Architecture and Design Festival (Seattle, U.S.)
Cinema Urbana - Architecture Film Festival Brasilia (Brasilia, Brazil)
Stockholm Independent Film Festival (Stockholm, Sweden) 2018
Art Space NAVEL, as part of BUILT-IN series (Los Angeles, U.S.)
Budapest Architecture Film Days (Budapest, Hungary)
Building with Light and Water (Parnu, Estonia)
CinEast Film Festival; Luxembourg Museum of Modern Art (Luxembourg City, LU)
Estonia National Television
Jurmala City Museum (Jurmala, Latvia)
Latgale Culture Embassy GORS (Rezekne, Latvia)
Latvia National Television
MONA - The Museum of New Arts as Latvia and Poland 100th Anniversary Exposition
Oktobarh - Architecture, Design and Art Festival (Novi Sad, Serbia)
Parnu International Documentary and Anthropology Film Festival (Parnu, Estonia) 2017
Bijou Theater, California Institute of the Arts (Los Angeles, U.S.)
Latvian National Film Award Lielais Kristaps (Riga, Latvia)
Riga International Film Festival (Riga, Latvia)

NOMINATIONS & AWARDS:
ArchFilmLund Prize for Best Documentary
Best feature documentary at the Stockholm Independent Film Festival
Latvian National Film Award Lielais Kristaps for Best Debut
Estonian People’s Award (Parnu International Film Festival)

INFO:
Cinematography by Valdis Celmiņš, Jānis Jurkovskis, and Norbert Shieh
Edited by Andra Doršs
Original Score by Voldemārs Johansons

Original languages: English, Mandarin, Latvian
Subtitled version: English
Available format: DCP
Production: VFS films (Latvia)
Producer: Uldis Cekulis uldis@vfs.lv / +371 29298077

This playful dreamy sequence, based on a poem by Jackson Hobert, is set around the Zenbudhistic idea of "gaining by letting go". The story itself, as well as its formal aspects, are spontaneous and game-like: the creator is the one being created at the same time, there is no beginning nor the end. The ever-changing scale of the objects plays with the viewer's perspective reminding of the relativity of everything around us.

FABLE
We hid in the trees and when we ran out of trees we hid in houses
made out of trees and when we ran out of houses we hid in
skyscrapers made out of steel and concrete and when we ran
out of skyscrapers we hid underground and then, only then,
did we begin to truly dream. Things you can’t imagine.
The actual future, the actual past.
Actual skyscrapers. Actual houses. Actual trees.
“Fable,” by Jackson Hobert. ©2017 Jackson Hobert. Used by permission

SCREENINGS:
2019
Anthology Film Archives (New York City, U.S.)
Los Feliz Theater (Los Angeles, U.S.)
Minneapolis Museum of Arts (Minneapolis, U.S.)
Riga International Film Festival (Riga, Latvia)

INFO:
Poem by Jackson Hobert
Cast - Emma Bobrova Lourié
Cinematography by Jānis Jurkovskis
Edited by Andra Doršs
Original Score by Artūrs Liepiņš (Domenique Dumont)
Production Design by Mārtiņš Straupe

Original languages: English
Available format: DCP
Production: motionopoems.org, tarhunsisters.lv
Contact: producer Zane Purina zane@tarhunsisters.lv

Sound We See: Riga is an experimental audiovisual story told by 24 artists, architects, writers, photographers, directors, designers and musicians from Riga, capturing 24-hours cycle in different parts of the city on 16mm. The analog filmmaking techniques and the “City Symphony” genre practiced by Wclasserimg-fluid Ruttmann and Dziga Vertov in the 1920s, were used as the starting points to explore the communal creative process and contemporary environment of the city. The project is part of Sound We See series initiated and mentored by Lisa Marr and Paolo Davanzo (Echo Park Film Center, Los Angeles U.S.). Original music score by Platons Buravickis.

SCREENINGS:
2018
Echo Park Film Center (Los Angeles, U.S.)
Quartair Contemporary Art Initiatives as installation (Hague, Netherlands)
2017
Riga International Film Festival (Riga, Latvia)

INFO:
Available format: HD
Production: echoparkfilmcenter.org, Arterritory

This short documentary features a used car dealer and his man's sanctuary - the garage. As an expert in the business, he advises a young woman on how to buy a decent car in California, meanwhile revealing some of the unwritten gender “rules”.

The exhibition was born of a wish to tell about those vivid figures of Latvian extraction who have managed to leave their mark on the global history of art - about the art of becoming a cosmopolitan without losing one’s identity. And simultaneously it is a question of/point of reference for the issue of national art in the global age -so topical in the 21st century. Is it possible at all? Does affiliation to a specific geographical and national space naturally and on an almost unconscious level means a set of shared features as far as artistic expression is involved - or perhaps national identity and roots still carry a significance in a world where traveling around the globe has become a mundane thing? Has art has become universal these days? We do not know and not found the answer. But what comes to mind is something that someone said while looking at an abstract expressionist explosion of energy (painting) by Edvīns Strautmanis - that it had been created by someone who knows that the Baltic Sea looked like.

Close-Up is a story of resilience, joy, daring and vitality - a story of Latvian artists in New York, one of whom, Svens Lūkins, the rising star of the 1960s American art scene, in 1972, at the height of his career, announced his decision to severe ties with the influential Pace Gallery and never again show his art in any commercial institution. Stoll remembered today, this was a vivid episode od the New York art life of the time. New York - the global epicenter of art, the most significant point of reference on the creative map of the world since the mid-1900s - has always been something like the Promised Land to the ambitious, talented, reckless and strong. It has always been seen as a city where the streets are filled with the air of freedom. Ans it was the ultimate opposite of the world behind the Iron Curtain when Māris Bišofs arrived there. His filigree virtuosic drawings, frequently based on paradoxes of life and always laced with a dose of wit and erudition, became a trademark part of the pages and covers of periodicals like The New York Times, Village Voice, The New Yorker, The Wal Street Journal for many years. In 1981, the painter Vija Celmiņš also moved to New York from California.
NYC has not lost its appeal in the 21st century -despite the harsh fight for survival that has become an integral part of life in the city today. Reminiscing about her arrival in New York in 1977, Dovanna Pagowski, the favorite model of Robert Mapplethorpe and Richard Avedibm says that it was a completely different place back then: you could become a New Yorker on your first day in the city. No-one was interested in your pedigree or shoes, just in how interesting and original you were. Today’s reality is quite different, and yet artists Astūrs Virtmanis and Signe Baumane are New Yorkers of more than twenty years standing. The painter Julian Schnabel, a friend of Svīns Strautmanis, recalling his youth and the evening spent in the Strautmanis’ lift in Grene Street, says that any artist who wanted to be a success had to move to New York. Is it still the case? Yes, young artists must ho to New York, the artist sats. Agewise, Indriķis Ģelzis is perhaps the youngest testimony to the truth of these words. Are all artists mentioned above American or Latvian artists? And is it even possible to pigeonhole them in this way?

36-Hour Sound Installation invites to return to the primal and pure artistic expression, paying attention to the sensual and subtle nuances. Respecting all forms of art, it seeks to manifest pure ideas, avoiding background noise, and redundant decorations. 36-hours long installation is a visual story of the sound when the radio expands beyond the FM frequency, pure space, pure creativity, pure attention. Here and now.

FEATURING:
ANDREA BELFI (IT), ATIS JĀKOBSONS (LV), BRAD NATH (US), COLIN JOHNCO (FR), DOMENIQUE DUMONT (LV), EDGARS RUBENIS (LV), ELIZABETA LĀCE (LV), GENTS (DK), JAMES BENNING (US), KRISTA UN RENIS DZUDZILO (LV), LAUREN AUDER (UK), MANFREDAS (LT) MAREUNROL'S (LV), MOTION GRAPHICS (US), SOFIA ILYAS (UK), TAKASHI MAKINO (JP), VISIBLE CLOAKS (US), VISIONIST & PEDRO MAIA (UK, PT)

With A Few Found Fragments exhibition James Benning seeks to unite the “found fragments” through materiality and physically, he re-paints re-stitches, re-writes, re-builds in effort to reconstruct biographies of his “heroes”. By formally repeating the actions of American outsider folk artists, author Henry David Thoreau, “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski or Afro-American artisan Missouri Pettway, Benning researches these individuals with a nearly archaeological approach, trying to revalue and re-question American history, landscape, and civilization.

An exhibition of photography, video works and sound installations mounted by the artist specifically for the Cēsis Art Festival, the show deals with 91 events in the life of Jonas Mekas, as well as the people involved.

Jonas Mekas (1922-2019), a Lithuanian-born representative of the American cultural scene, a genuine cult figure of the 20th-century culture – an artist, filmmaker, writer, poet, critic and musician. His art focuses on everything that is going on around him – the everyday life and friends. In the 1950s Jonas Mekas, aged 27, found himself in New York and for his first money bought a Bolex camera. His first subjects were Brooklyn immigrants, later followed by Andy Warhol, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, the blonde Nico – the voice of The Velvet Underground, Salvador Dalí and many others. Not just an outstanding fact of art, today the body of Jonas Mekas work is also a creative chronicle of the New York of the latter half of the 20th century. During his career, Mekas has made dozens of internationally acclaimed films, published several poetry collections and books on film theory, as well as countless newspaper and magazine articles, and forayed into art, creating installations and photographs. In his work, Mekas has often emphasised his Lithuanian roots and found various ways in which to inform the Western society about the fate of the Baltic States.

INFO:
Cinematography by Jurģis Kmins
Edited by Tianés Montasser

This project is an attempt to find a way for analog film to move and transform in relation to the performer. The relationship between light, darkness, and the speed of the film creates a dialogue between image and the movement of the dancers. Light “hitting” the film is a physical process - the faster the film moves, the less light is able to get through the lens and vice versa. The faster the film moves, the slower the movement of the dancer appears. In improvised dance, one dancer's movements can affect the movements of the other, in a way similar to the way light, speed, and film are dependent on each other. Performed by Yun Hong Cho and Joan Padeo.