Baltic Sea Docs 30th anniversary film programme

From September 8 to 13, the 30th documentary film forum “Baltic Sea Docs” will take place, offering twelve internationally acclaimed documentaries. Forum screenings will take place at the “Splendid Palace” cinema in Riga, Cēsis, Liepāja, Rēzekne, and Jēkabpils municipality in Sala. Part of the program will also be available online on the National Film Centre of Latvia platform filmas.lv.

For the past 1930s, the Documentary Film Forum has been one of the most important documentary film platforms in the Baltic region, simultaneously promoting the creation of new films and giving Latvian audiences the opportunity to see the world’s most relevant documentary films on the big screen.

The forum will be opened by Ukrainian director Yulia Hontaruk’s documentary film “To Die To Live” – a co-production of Latvia, Ukraine, and Slovakia, created with the participation of the Latvian studio “VFS Films,” which premiered at the prestigious Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. An emotionally direct portrait of three Ukrainian fighters, created over 12 years, reveals that war does not end the moment the battlefield is abandoned. The echo of war intervenes in relationships, silence, the body, and the sense of time.

This year, the “Baltic Sea Docs” film program takes viewers to the Amazon rainforests and Finnish tundra, the Greek islands and the  border with New York State, the  Silicon Valley, and the Baltic Sea coast. The program includes films awarded at international festivals, including works created with the support of the Documentary Film Forum co-production platform. Viewers will have the opportunity to watch documentary films from Sweden, Denmark, France, Germany, Estonia, Finland, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, Slovakia, and the USA. The films’ themes address human rights, technology, climate change, family relationships, geopolitics, the search for identity, artistic responsibility, and freedom of expression.

The program shows a close-up of Ukraine’s experience in the films “To Die To Live”, “Where everything disappears” a Roman Bondarchuka “Ukrainian sheriffs”. Swedish director Neitan Grossman’s “Amazonmania” invites reflection on the ethics of documentary cinema and the consequences of the colonial perspective, while the Danish film “Techplomacy” on the relationship between artificial intelligence, technology companies, and democracy.

Themes of family, growing up, and interpersonal relationships are addressed in the films “My Family and Other Clowns,” “Becoming Rosi”, “The Beauty of Errors’’ and “Little Sinner,” while “Under the Red Ligh” and “The Queen and the Smokehouse” invite viewers to look at the cultural memory, identity, and human relationship with the environment in the Baltic region.

The program also includes the latest film by one of the most important contemporary American documentarians, Alex Gibney, “Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie”, inspired by Salman Rushdie’s recent book, Gibney focuses on the recovery period of the world-famous Indian-British writer after the 2022 New York attack, which resulted in the loss of one eye. The film’s special intimacy is created by footage shot by Rushdi’s wife in a hospital, documenting his slow return to life.

Several screenings will be complemented by conversations with film directors and creative teams, giving viewers the opportunity to learn about the filmmaking process and discuss the issues addressed within them.