Making Films In Latvia - First Motion

30
Collective fate and sentiments of a generation are also explored in Antra
Cilinska’s sequels to the Soviet Union smash-hit (seen at its time by millions)
documentary Is it Easy to Be Young? (Vai viegli būt jaunam?, 1986, dir. Juris
Podnieks), which, in a daring approach, revealed, through previously unseen candid
interviews with several young people, the hopes and anxieties of the last Soviet
generation. Is it Easy to Be...? (Vai viegli būt?, 1997), Is it Easy...? (Vai viegli...?,
2010), revisit the persons interviewed in the first film after 10 and 20 years
respectively, and in doing so, create a fairly accurate portrait of the social and
economic changes Latvia and its society have gone through since the restoration of
the independence in 1991. In its personal approach, the trilogy bears a striking
resemblance, in its attempts to define the general by exploring the individual and the
personal, to the famous The Up Series (1964 - 2012) by Michael Apted.
The next group of films, and possibly the one which should be singled out
most, can be characterized as a look at the contemporary situation in Latvia,
especially though the prism of socially deprived individuals and jarring political
conflicts.
Andris Gauja is one of the most promising and scandalous young documentary
filmmakers thanks to the controversial subject matter he chooses to portray in his
films. His second documentary feature, Victor (Viktors, 2009) was a daring and
poignant portrait of a dying man, offering a bleak and uncompromising look at the
inevitable and not steering away from despair, anger, and pain associated with it. The
following film, Family Instinct (Ăimenes lietas, 2010), went on to cause a major
controversy at home and to be screened and awarded at international film festivals. It
is not easy to define what is more shocking about the film – its subject or the way it is
presented. A portrait of a closely-knit community in a rural Latvian village, it is,
essentially, a story about incest – the film’s protagonist is a young woman living with
her brother, who has fathered their two children, - heavy substance abuse, moral
degradation, social ineptness, even mental disabilities; however the element of fiction
is jarring. It appears that although the original situation may not be far from what is
seen on the screen, most of the dialogues, monologues, or pieces of action simply
cannot be referred to as “documental”, as everything seems staged, re-played, and
organized, the people portrayed acting as characters in a well-structured play. Thus
the question really is that of the most controversial element here – are these the
degraded subjects or they way they are exposed? In this sense, the film bears a