Chaland Films

The director of the film looks at his father, photographer and non-conformist, from a drone’s perspective, as he digs a grave humming his childhood song.

Spring 2021. A cinephile invites you on an intimate trip through the last surviving cinema houses in Latvia. This documentary essay, shot on super 8mm, opens the locked doors to picture houses during a Covid-19 lockdown, perhaps the most difficult time in the history of physical cinema space.

Eighty-two-year-old Juris Kalniņš has found his name in the archives of the Committee for State Security of the Latvian SSR, where he is identified as an informant. Both during the Soviet era and today, he remains an uncompromising free thinker who has devoted most of his life to photographing people and documenting the spirit of the times. With the camera now turned towards Juris, he is ready to delve into his past to understand how his name could have ended up on a KGB file. What makes a person an informant – a piece of paper, mere suspicion, the opinions of others, or one’s own actions?

A documentary essay examining the creative process of creating a book from the writer's first thought to the printing of the typescript.