VFS Films

A local guide is asked to lead a group of influencers along the river of a remote valley. As they get deeper into the wilderness, their venture takes a frightening turn.

“TESA MAN” is a music film – a poetic exploration of the relationship between collective creativity and the natural world. The film blurs the lines between reality and imagination, inviting viewers into an animistic experience where music performed by the band Tesa in a frozen Baltic landscape attempts to transform air, steam, ash and clay into something much more alive

In the Cold War years of the 1970s, an American patrol boat meets a Soviet ship off the east coast of the United States for talks about fishing rights in the Atlantic. In the midst of this, while Russian commanders are aboard the U.S. Coast Guard vessel where the talks are being held, a Lithuanian sailor jumps across the ten feet of icy water separating the boats. Crash-landing on the deck of the American ship, he desperately begs for asylum. Though they try, the Americans ultimately fail to provide protection and the Soviets are allowed to capture him and brutally return him to their vessel. Thus begins a stranger-than-fiction story of imprisonment, discovery, fame, and freedom. Through rare archival footage and a dramatic first-person re-enactment of that fateful day by Simas Kudirka, the would-be defector himself, this tale of one of the biggest Cold War muddles takes us on a journey of uncanny twists of fate, and the emotional sacrifices of becoming a universal symbol of freedom.

Inta is a brusque, crusty woman who lives alone on the edge of a picturesque marsh. One day her solitude is intruded upon by the arrival of a documentary filmmaker. In his eyes Inta is an outstanding would-be film protagonist but the wild woman would rather put a curse on the importunate intruder than let herself be filmed. But the filmmaker's persistence finally succeeds in melting the ice of Inta's heart... just in order to break it soon afterwards.

The film tells a story about the latest musical revolution in recent history – the early days of the rave scene and the golden age of techno culture. International political changes in the mid-80s and early 90s, including the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, in a short period of time allowed this cultural phenomenon to become a mass movement which was almost completely independent from the global corporations and which did not fight with the system but created its own system.

A laid-back journey in search of one of the world’s most fascinating families, observed and examined from within its most intimate relationships, where the truth and depth of a memoir meet the ironic tone of an indie comedy.

The dance of life and death, with humanity entering the fray. An artist, a zoologist, a nature scholar, and a sheep farmer working in the IT sector, who also happens to be an astronomy enthusiast, all view the demise of biological bodies differently. Forest carrion, larvae under tombstones, sheep in the barn, layers of feathers and bones, and shimmering green flies on decaying flesh – amidst all this is a human trying to understand their place in cosmology. In this grand tapestry of transformation, what is the human species: part of a cycle or more akin to superhuman?

Under the loving but firm guidance of an old fan turned director and cultural diplomat, and to the surprise of a whole world, the ex-Yugoslavian cult band Laibach becomes the first rock group ever to perform in the fortress state of North Korea.

New performers have recently moved into the 130-year-old building of the Riga Circus. Having built a stage in the stables, actors Ance, Āris, Klāvs, Reinis and the other members of the theatre company Kvadrifrons are reinvigorating and preserving the tradition of live art in the circus. The name of the group is an acronym in Latvian that conveys their ethos: they are an organisation that can chill with their friends, have bursts of amazing creativity, and whose members are far from unintelligent. And all the while, the strong smell of elephants wafts through the building. Here and there, the life of the previous inhabitants makes itself known. Soon shamanistic rituals alternate with clowning around, fortune-telling with illusion juggling, stagecraft with personal choices. Then suddenly, out of Nothing… emerges Theatre.

Instead of Einars Pelšs' eighth poetry book, he publishes his collected works, but the buyer of the book receives an ordinary brick. He translates the authors of the Russian Golden Age and publishes them under his own name, challenging the boundaries of literature. Is a poet who makes fun of art unique or exactly what we expect from contemporary authors? Einarrative is an extraordinary story that portrays the narrative of the life of Einārs Pelšs. In the film, this narrative is an experience of contrasting changes both in its visual style and in Einars’ poetic works and personality, allowing him to get involved in the depiction of the narrative himself, making the film as Einārs Pelšs' audiovisual collected works.

While playing hide and seek, children discover unprecedented objects, places, and creatures behind the doors of an antique wardrobe! They find themselves in an unexpected universe full of colours and sounds, inhabited by beings both real and only encountered in fantasy. They, too, hide and seek each other throughout the year.

Driving in their yellow Lada flying its own little Ukrainian flag, they travel from incident to incident – calming an angry neighbor, investigating the discovery of a body, struggling to unfold a stroller and attempting to re-integrate Vova, the freeloader who eats other people’s dogs but actually longs for a normal existence – just like everyone else here. The seasons pass until political developments reach the village by way of the TV screen, sowing separatist discord.

Mother takes her eight-year-old daughter Antonia to a children’s creativity camp. Antonia is not happy about having to spend time under close adult supervision. On their way, she spots a sign saying ”The Robots Have Escaped!” The sign unleashes Antonia’s imagination and grows into a fantasy of how exciting her stay in the camp might turn out to be. Of course, Antonia’s and the robots’ paths intersect at the camp, where they intend to steal children’s dreams during their afternoon nap to convert them into ingenious commercials. Thriller-like events unfold. Thanks to Antonia’s inquisitive and rebellious nature and with her best friend and favourite toy Yeti by her side, the robots’ intention is averted.

Apatity, a far-north industrial town in Russia, first came into being as a USSR concentration camp. Although its environment is at the brink of ecological disaster, the people here still believe in the state’s promise of immortality that can be gained through sacrificial service to the fatherland. This is how the elite in a totalitarian state buy a person’s will, strength, talent and, indeed, life, turning the human being into another resource that is as faceless as a grey lump of ore. ‘I cannot fight big corporations or state structures with a film. But I hope that there is someone in the darkness of the cinema whose heart will get a bit warmer after seeing it,’ says the director. The larger part of the film was shot during the polar night.

At the beginning of the 1960s, when the French pioneers of cinéma vérité set out to achieve a new realism, and when direct cinema in Québec began to vie for notice, the Baltics wit-nessed the birth of a generation of documentarists who favored a more romantic view of the world around them. This meditative documentary essay – from a Latvian writer and Lithuanian director whose composed touch has long dovetailed with the stylistically diverse works of the Baltic New Wave – pushes adroitly past the limits of the common his-toriographic investigation to create a portrait of less-clearly remembered filmmakers. The result is a consummate poetic treatment of the ontology of documentary creation. Also a cinematic poem about cinema poets.

They're called water carriers, domestics, 'gregarios', 'Sancho Panzas' of professional cycling. Always at the back of the group, with no right for a personal victory. These wonderful losers are the true warriors of professional cycling.

Every day, come rain or shine, Theodore used to bike the seven kilometres from his house to the centre of the village to sit and drink beer in the bus stop. For him, no doubt, this place was the centre of the Universe. With his death, the centre has moved elsewhere, and the bus stop is just a bus stop again.

More than twenty years after Vladimir Putin came to supreme power in Russia on May 7, 2000, Russian society is deeply divided. A young, modern generation opposes the growing repression by the regime, which still retains the support of many members of previous generations. Who are these ordinary citizens who dream of living in a different Russia? What price will they have to pay to achieve the freedom and justice they so desire?

Inese (41) and Karlis (62) occupy an illegally built hut in the suburbs of Riga in Latvia. After the collapse of socialism, they have found themselves at the bottom of the social ladder, doomed to fighting for mere existence. They live on a single retiring allowance and other people’s leftovers. They are neither alcoholics nor criminals, they are les misérables of today. They are growing scraggy vegetables, picking mushrooms, gathering windfallen branches for fuel, and breeding earthworms for anglers. Everything they put their hands to falls through… After fifteen years of living together, Karlis and Inese are expecting their first baby.

Psychological thriller connecting three different people in the mysterious vortex, trying to untangle the dramatic fight of border between the truth and fantasy. Rob, a former real estate broker, unemployed, starts following a strange Japanese woman, Oki, who constantly moves from house to house. He drags his roommate Wylie into the investigation during which they have to face the dark past and curse of Oki, while dealing with the history of their own.