‘A Totally Crazy, Passionate Journey’: How the Latvian Film Industry Rose From the Post-Soviet Rubble to Arrive on the World Stage
Christopher Vourlias When a young Viesturs Kairiss started to dream about becoming a filmmaker thirty-some-odd years ago, he knew his path wouldn’t be straightforward or easy. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, aspiring Latvian directors would have to travel to Moscow or St. Petersburg to enroll in venerable Soviet film schools. After independence, Kairiss was among the first class of graduates from the newly launched film studies program at the Latvian Academy of Culture, one of many ways in which the small Baltic republic attempted to assert its own identity after half a century of Soviet rule. “We didn’t have any technique,” Kairiss admits of he and his film school peers, laughing. For his first feature film, “Leaving by the Way” (2001), he enlisted friends for below-the-line work and recruited actors from the local theater school. When the film bowed in the Crystal Globe competition at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, it was the culmination of what he describes as “a totally crazy, passionate journey” for a group of filmmakers laboring in an industry that didn’t truly exist.