My World - Paris, London, Berlin, Rome

The international film festival Arsenāls has been a fixture on the Riga scene for the last 20 years. It has introduced new film aesthetic and was one of the only creatively free events during Soviet times. Over the years the festival has influenced culture and society in Eastern Europe, continually dazzling us with its creativity. The film is a portrait of the director, the father of Arsenals and trusty knight of surrealism.

In Bed with Surrealism. Augusts Sukuts

The fading romance of the era of train travel is portrayed in the faces of railway workers, at lonely stations where trains no longer stop, on empty tracks where trains no longer run.

The Stations

A film about Vera Mukhina (1889-1953) based on the diaries of the outstanding Riga-born sculptress who studied in Paris with Rodin’s pupil Bourdelle, the master of European sculpture. At the 1937 Paris World Exposition, Mukhina presents her monumental sculptural ensemble Worker and Peasant Woman. Weighing 75 tons and 53metres high, it becomes a sensation. Mukhina truly believes in human ideas, and this is successfully used by the USSR propaganda machine.

Version Vera

The creative documentary Piano Player is a story about the piano player and musician Oscar Strock, who was a well known tango music composer in 1920s Europe. Nobody knew him – only his music was well known. The life of Strock is like a side-show of everlasting debts, long voyages and wild and unlucky love affairs that find their best interpretation through his tango music. The piano player is a man, who barely arranges his life according to the political and economic circumstances in the world. To earn money, he plays for pubs and cinema theatres in Riga, Berlin and Paris, and for lovers, he writes the most romantic tango music.