Well, we don’t really have coolies. Understand for yourself, the budget of film students, – said actor Matīss Budovskis bluntly. Kristapa the Great at the award ceremony at the beginning of February, thus emphasizing through a joke: there is no backstage, everything happens right here, in front of everyone’s eyes. The director of the ceremony Matīss Kaža and his team highlighted the young filmmakers this time – 40 students of the LKA National Film School, whose presence permeated the entire evening. This is the new generation of filmmakers who will not enter the industry in a few years or even further in the future, but are already present.
They make films, they have goals and ideas. They have something to say.
DRIVE FORWARD
I make sure of the energy when I meet with the student team at the film school. A little anxiety can be felt in them before the photo session, but afterwards the conversation flows into a playful exchange of ideas, organically complementing and supporting each other. The filmmakers who applied for the campaign say that the number of upcoming works is actually higher – not eight, but twelve – but not all filmmakers have been able to attract the necessary budget. Therefore, for the second year in a row, film school students are organizing a donation campaign together with LKA.
The spectrum of the eight short documentary films is wide – here you can find both the heritage of the Baltic poetic documentary cinema, as well as close-ups of two different chroniclers, selflessness and devotion to the society, an “assignment” to a friend and other unexpected points of view on Latvian society and the processes taking place there. The coordinator of the campaign, young producer Nadine Anna Larionova, says that “in recent years, local cinema has focused on growth in a positive sense”. Producer Emma Daniela Grāpe thinks similarly – in her opinion, Latvian cinema has become “more versatile, more progressive and more vibrant”, as the new generation sees and finds its role and place in it.
It should be noted that crowdfunding as an additional tool for budgeting is an increasingly common phenomenon in the practice of Latvian cinema in recent years.
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