Pauls Bankovskis

The End

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?

Immortal

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.

The Garages

The closed microcosm of garage co-ops, where the socio-economic environment has blended with personal space, provides a step back in time. Men are still boys, but their tinkering is both the trade and hobby of individual entrepreneurs, since self-exploitation as leisure time activity is a time capsule where neoliberalism has enclosed the postindustrial proletariat. Inventors, geniuses, crazy scientists, and men with golden hands - you will find them in garages.

Eliyahu Rips: The Burning

In April 1969 Ilya (Eliyahu) Rips, then a young student of mathematics, tried to burn himself in a public square in Riga, Latvia protesting against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He was stopped and eventually sent to a psychiatric hospital for two years. Thanks to international pressure from the mathematical community in 1972 he was allowed to emigrate to Israel. Now he is considered one of the most brilliant mathematicians in the world. At the same time, for most people familiar with his name, Rips is first of all associated with the development of the so called Bible Code – a mathematical program allegedly helping to decipher hidden messages encoded in Torah – the Five Books of Moses. He is attacked by both the scientific and religious community, yet his research continues.

Klucis. The Deconstruction of an Artist

Latvian artist Gustavs Klucis embraced the technological revolution of the early 20th century and applied it to his art, becoming a classic of Russian constructivism. He created photo-montage and Lenin’s public image, and became the most important Soviet artist. Killed by Stalin’s regime, his artistic career poses many unanswered questions. This documentary reveals many secrets and intimate moments of his dramatic personality – the unequal duel between the Artist and the Power.

Sea of Attractions

The narrow, sandy strip of the seashore is a neutral zone that belongs equally to the sea and the mainland. This zone possesses an unusual chracteristic, namely, it attracts people with a practically magnetic power, transforming the beach into something like a playground where the old and the new, the primitive and the civilised, the traditional and the modern all coexist.

Dangerous Summer

A historical drama about an attempt to steal the entire Latvian national wealth deposited abroad by Wilhelms Munters, the Latvian Foreign Minister in the forties.