Ego Media

Leningrad, 1970. A group of young Jewish dissidents plot to hijack an empty plane and escape the USSR. Caught by the KGB a few steps from boarding, they were sentenced to years in the gulag and two were sentenced to death; they never got on a plane. 45 years later, filmmaker Anat Zalmanson-Kuznetsov reveals the compelling story of her parents, leaders of the group, "heroes" in the West but "terrorists" in Russia, even today.

Elsa falls in love with a quadriplegic genius, her patient Nicola, whose mansion hides a secret – Nicola is obsessed with the creation of an artificial intellect. His creation, named Anna, stops at nothing to keep her master just for herself.

An insecure millennial woman pursues her dream whilst learning how to adult. While being preoccupied with life tasks at hand she can barely handle and also severe depression, main character of this film Marta (30) keeps dreaming about making films, drawn to the healing power of storytelling, but not having the courage to act these dreams out; sometimes she is too scared to even pick up the phone. Marta’s life seems to sway both in comic and tragic directions: it’s sometimes a mix of ultimate freedom, sex, drugs, friendship, laughter, alcohol, lots of alcohol, music, honesty and love, and sometimes the reality Marta avoids to face becomes so brutal she can’t take it anymore. Through the course of the film Marta learns there is an unavoidable question that at some point becomes inevitable for almost every filmmaker: if you really want to direct films, can you first direct yourself out of depression?

They met on Christmas Eve, beyond one's usual living-space: at the morgue. In an outburst of feelings, they try to manipulate each other in order to get what they want. She wants him, but he wants to vanish – following the rules of black comedy, neither one of them will get anything.

After the lives of several people are tied into a intriguing knot upon meeting police officer Krasts one hot summer day, they’re all brought together again on a full moon winter night. Intrigue develops among a couple of lovers, Gints and Elga, three adventure-race participants with one woman, Renate, on their team, three generations of a family whose father, Karlis, died in a tragic hunting accident, Karlis’s daughter Aija, his former lover Livija, and a young girl hardened by life, who lives at a Christian home for expectant mothers. A detective twist is added by a bit of poison, which one of them will get.

A Latvian tragicomedy about a young artist who bears witness to the dramatic political upheavals of the WWII era. As brutal regimes come and go, his country, his village, his people, and even his heart are swept up in the inexorable currents of history.

Ilze Burkovska, a little girl who is obsessed with stories of World War II and will be a filmmaker in a distant future, lives in Latvia under the totalitarian boot of the Soviets and the ominous shadow of the many menaces and horrors of the Cold War.

Ieva has been an obedient granddaughter for years – choosing a safe career in a bank as her grandmother wanted. Her mother left the family years ago when she had to look for work abroad. That has made ties between Ieva and her grandmother especially tight. Dissatisfaction with the constant adaption to the material world is flickering under the surface and Ieva lives her dreamlife with her friends. She plays the keyboard in a girl band and stays out late. When Ieva decides to have a provocative tattoo on her arm made, her grandmother goes completely nuts.

The Man Who Saved the World is a feature documentary film about Stanislav Petrov, a former lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Forces.

Vitaly Mansky’s intimate and insightful new documentary finds him crisscrossing Ukraine in the wake of the Maidan uprising, which has left his relatives scattered on both sides of a highly charged and dizzyingly complex political situation.

Death as non-existence, non-being, or the absence of life has been a subject of human interest for millennia. Poets, philosophers, prophets, and hermits have now been replaced by filmmakers, influencers, cryonicists, and evolutionary biologists in the search for the quintessence of life and death. Zoltan Istvan runs a cryonics laboratory and is running for president of the United States with the demand that immortality be included among fundamental human rights. In Russia, a mass festival dedicated to the cult of death is traditionally held. Dāvis Sīmanis' film essay reveals the twists and turns of man's age-old desire for eternal life. It uncovers the metaphorical and fetishistic representations of death and the mechanisms by which we come to terms with our own mortality.

A youngster Andis, 21 offers a friend of his grandmother Mara, 80, who is dying, to fulfil her every wish in exchange for her apartment after her death. This agreement lets both of them rethink their attitude for what they actually want.

Pavlensky/Pawlenski, artist and activist, is leading the way in forging social change in Russia. Through an multiple courageous performances, he acts as society's conscience in the face of an increasingly totalitarian state. From lying naked in a coil of barbed wire, to nailing his scrotum to the floor of Red Square, his acts of defiance aim to spark debate and catalyse reform. This documentary follows his mission to challenge the state.

Piirissaar is a tiny Estonian island in Lake Peipus, on the very border of Russia. The Russian Old Believers who inhabited the island appeared here 300 years ago, during the Great Northern War, fleeing from the religious reforms in the Orthodox Church and to avoid being mobilized in the Russian army. As the waves have washed the island smaller and smaller, the community here has also fused over time, inevitably reaching the brink of extinction. However, the local culture and sense of life that developed in isolation from the rest of the “Russian world” has not yet completely disappeared from Piiriissaar.

When 15-year-old rebellious Stefi goes missing, her mother Helena has nothing left to lose. Why cling to sanity when madness offers a chance for reconciliation and love?

1940. On the border between Latvia and the USSR, a woman is killed in front of her house as she tried to protect her son from the liberating attack of the Soviets. Almost 80 years later, the archive photo bearing witness to this news item and representing a collateral victim of the European Union’s founding conflict forms the starting point for a journey undertaken by Davis Sīmanis. He navigates from one side to the other of this border, which today represents another separation, one that is geographical but also cultural: between Europe and Russia.

A story about a city built as a paradise but turned into hell – a city slowly turning into paradise again, just in a different way. Igor has been living in the Chernobyl Zone for almost ten years, for peace and a chance to escape modern civilization. Psychological issues, both personal and global, are still troubling him, and he embodies both harmonizing peace and supernatural stress. And an existential secret – the secret of the essence of life. He is surrounded by the elderly inhabitants of Chernobyl, living in villages entirely overcome by nature. They lead their unrealistic Atlantean lives, from which even war in Ukraine seems to be happening on another planet.

Anatols Imermanis was a Latvian crime writer and a poet during Soviet occupation. He could call himself a successful, financially stable soviet writer. But he wanted more – to be free. The free West, especially Paris, was a life-long dream for Imermanis, but he was never allowed to leave the Soviet Union. So he created his own personal Paris – a bohemian lifestyle, sexual freedom, ignoring all puritan norms of the soviet world. He died alone without fulfilling his dream about Paris. But death was not a reason to give up – his last will was to be cremated and his ashes to be dispersed in Paris red light quarters.

This documentary deals with faith, human aging, a struggle to fulfill your vision and above all - one particular building. In its poetical minimalism the film observes the construction of the new Latvian National Library, which has become a metaphor for a temple, a boiling-point for an entire nation.

A creative a portrait of Latvian luger and Olympic medal winner, Martins Rubenis, who won the first Latvia's Winter Olympic medal of the games in Turin in 2006. Apart from his success in sports, in the circles of contemporary alternative culture he is known as DJ Betons from the association Varka Kru (Varka – from Russian "boiling", Kru – from English "crew"). Like the medieval knight Lohengrin, Martins Rubenis arrives in his luge to fight a battle - with an adversary, with himself, with time and the world.