Jānis Putniņš

The Year Before the War

Stylized as silent cinema, the film connects political and philosophical extremes of 1913 in a story of a young man participating at the creation of a new world. This mysterious adventurer, who was known as Peter the Lett, gets involved in a tragicomic and surreal race from a routine clerk job and a romantic passion in Riga to preparation of the world revolution in Vienna, psychoanalysis at Freud’s salon and seduction of Mata Hari in Paris.

Hide-and-seek

A young woman, Regina, has been killed in her apartment. Investigator Anderson holds Regina’s husband as a suspect for a murder because he is unable to remember his location at the time of the fateful event. Gradually, Anderson is convinced that Oto has not only killed his wife, but he also tries to hide his true identity – notorious criminal Schmit.

Investigation of Related Events

The movie shows a young man's life dramatically changed after his friend is murdered. It is ironic - if to look with today's eyes - and nostalgia evoking portrait of marginal society and environment in the early 1990s with allusions to the western cinema - film noir related themes, surrealistic features, avantgard cinema stylization and formal aesthetics.