Guna Zariņa

A nightmarish evening unfolds for neighbors David and Robert when they accidentally hit a woman on her bike and flee the scene. While David is increasingly plagued by feelings of guilt, Robert shows no remorse and becomes overbearing and possessive.

From an early age, songs and fairytales convinced Zelma that Love would solve all her problems as long as she abided by societal expectations of how a girl should act. But as she grew older something didn't seem right with the concept of love: the more she tried to conform, the more her body resisted. A story about the acceptance of the inner female rebellion.

Everyone has their own emotional overwhelm regarding a bad smell. Lizete, an amateur interviewer, is eager to record the moments when it is revealed. Dealing with the topic of bad odour's influences on society, this is an animated short film for adults in the inquiring style of a documentary. The director continues to work on tragi-comic stories about our natural awkwardness while finding ourselves.

This creative documentary tells the story of women in art – what she has to sacrifice in her personal life and what choices have to be made in order to gain success in her career. The film explores life of artist, by following theatre director’s Mara Kimele's fighting relationships with her despotic grandmother Anna Lacis (widely known as Asya, whose life is closely tied to the names of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brech), cynical son Peteris (who is played by an actor) and work while she stages F. Dostoevsky's “Crime and Punishment”. Every character of film is an act. But does that make them any less real? And what is real in the world of art? Apart from its human character's, the film also has an animated one – the horse, who came into life through the first letter Mara wrote to her grand mother and has been following her ever since.

The 14th of June 1941, Soviet-occupied Latvia. Without warning, the authorities break into the house of Melanie and her husband Alexander, and force them to leave everything behind. Together with more than 15 000 Latvians, Melanie and her son get deported to Siberia. In her fight against cold, famine and cruelty, she only gains new strength through the letters she writes to Alexander, full of hope for a free Latvia and a better tomorrow.

While examining one of her patients, a doctor reveals that her husband is cheating with the patient's wife.

Summer, 1989. City girls, Paula and Laura, spend their summer holidays in a small town with their cousins, Maija and Linda. Four girls, left unattended, enjoy freedom, imitate the life of adults, plunge into reckless adventures and get into trouble. Based on true events, nine-year-old Paula’s story of growing up is set against the background of time when Latvia made her first steps towards independence.

A unique, engaging film that combines documentary footage with narrative cinema to tell the story of four generations of a Latvian family. Sixteen year-old student Jānis has been given an interesting homework assignment – to draw his family tree and explain it. The story of his family begins with his great-great-grandfather who burned down the manors of German landowners during the 1905 revolution. My Family Tree takes us on a journey to various countries and political regimes, showing Jānis’ ancestors to be people of diverse fates and life stories. A rich Latvian trader, a red rifleman loyal to Lenin, a carpenter with the KGB and war refugees in Sweden are only a few branches on his family tree, and the boy has heard something unusual and unforgettable about each and every one of these people.

Pigtail loves the winter holidays, but this year, shortly before Christmas, Brother comes into the world, turning everything upside down. Grandmother arrives from the countryside, because Pigtail’s parents no longer have time to take her skating, but Pigtail and her best friend, Mr. Sleeplessness, don’t like the new order. They come up with a plan – to send Brother and Grandmother to the Moon, in a bid to reclaim parental attention.

Maria decides to go for a swim in the pool even though it looks deserted and she’s warned that the water is cold. When she gets into the pool she is faced with not only the frigid water, but with her other feelings as well. Like fear.

When the daughter of the Sun and the Moon is stolen, desperate parents call people to get their baby back. Helpers are given only three days: if at that time, the Sun's daughter will not be found, she will lose her strength and become an ordinary girl. A journey of danger and adventure, which teaches everyone not only to be brave and resourceful, but also helpful. The Latvian animated film is based on folklore motifs.

Based on a Lithuanian writer’s novel “Breathing Into Marble” the film focuses on the challenges of a modern family. It is a romantic ballad with the plot of a thriller. Izabele and Liudas – itellectuals living in a homestead near a big city and raising the son, Gailius, who has a case of epilepsy and is smarter than most children his age. Izabele convinces her husband to adopt a six-year-old boy who is unable to put down roots in this new family and always fights for mother’s attention.

Ainars has been a principal of a local music school for forty years until he is unexpectedly fired. Ainars feels betrayed. Seeing him unhappy, his wife Anita decides to act. When the new principal candidate arrives at the music school, the world created by the two of them collapses. The new suppresses the old and it just seems that everything that has been done before is left in vain.

A tale about a nine-year old boy's relationship with the world around him, shot in one of Latvia's poorest and most beautiful regions - Latgale

It is year 1994. Spring. In Jelgava – a small town in Latvia. Jānis (14) – behaves well at school, shows interest in all subjects, and studies well. His mother loves him very much. There are exactly two things happening in one day, which change his life completely. One – a new girl, Kristīne (15), comes to his class and attracts everybody’s attention immediately. And second– Kurt Cobain commits suicide. Until this moment Jānis does not know anything neither about Nirvana, nor about Cobain. But very soon he finds out.

Based on a Soviet propaganda story about Young Pioneer (the Soviet equivalent of a Boy Scout) Morozov, who denounced his father to Stalin’s secret police and was in turn killed by his family. His life exemplified the duty of all good Soviet citizens to become informers, at any expense. In our film, 75 years later, we call him little Janis. He is a Pioneer who lives on the Soviet collective farm “Dawn”. His father is an enemy of the farm (and the Soviet system) and plots against it. Little Janis betrays his father; his father takes revenge upon his son. Who then in this old Soviet tale is good and who is bad? This film reveals that a distorted brain is always dangerous. Even today.

A family film based on the book Bille by Vizma Belševica. An extraordinary, lonely yet spiritually strong little girl attempts to comprehend the adult world, which in her eyes is very contradictory, and to prove her own value despite the ignorance and lack of appreciation by her family in late 1930s. Bille tries to find an escape in her vivid imagination.

After recovering from an overseas mission, Krists Lapins moves into a quiet neighbourhood in Riga. His hopes for a new, peaceful life are disrupted when an unexpected visitor arrives one night. Krists soon finds himself in a swirl of events involving a mysterious blonde, a wannabe private detective, a bankrupt millionaire, and a rigorous cop. In this witty portrayal of modern Latvian society the absurd meets the comic and nothing is what it seems.

OUT is an odyssey about 50 year old family man Agoston wandering through East Europe. After loosing his lifelong job in a power plant of small Slovak village Agoston takes the shady but alluring opportunity to work as a welder in a shipyard in Latvia. The journey in hopes of a new job in reality turns into a accelerating whirlwind of absurd events of short encounters, newly found-and-lost-again friendships subtracting from Agoston all his possessions and everything he once believed to be his whole life. However Agoston doesn't give up his search for income and decides to persuade his dream of catching a big sea fish.

Oleg, a young Latvian butcher, arrives in Brussels in the hope of getting a better salary in a meat factory. His experience turns short after being betrayed by a colleague. Alone in a country where he doesn’t belong, he quickly falls under the yoke of Andrzej, a Polish criminal.

The shy scientist Lars decides to publish a small ad in order to find a girlfriend. From the 218 replies, he selects Brigita, an attractive Latvian woman and invites her to Stockholm. But what actually happens after Brigita's arrival is far more complicated than Lars could ever have imagined.

A miniseries about the events during one summer in a family of a writer who are unexpectedly granted a remote estate with all its unusual inhabitants, and who has to decide what to do with the dilapidated estate. Exciting and comic events in eight episodes in which the future writer Anšlavs Eglītis together with his brother Vidvuds, father Viktors and his wife Hilda Vīka, begin the restoration of the estate, at the same time opening a boarding house, which becomes the intersection and summer stage of the neighbourhood, ghosts of the past, visitors from the city and Latvian intellectuals in Latvia in the 1920s.

A Latvian series shot by the team at Jaunais Rīgas Teātris / New Riga Theatre over the course of summer 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. It's a story about a world that once again changes rapidly. About the belief that everything on this planet is subject to manipulation. The series centers around an advertising agency - a classic office where professionalism mixes with boredom, romance and an existential tiredness.

A story about Emīlija Benjamiņa, the “queen of the press” in interwar Latvia, whose wealth and tragic fate have since become folklore. The film’s narrative covers the period from the beginnings of Emīlija’s magazine Atpūta (Recreation), to her arrest and slow demise in a train en route to Siberia. The most prominent clairvoyant of the time - Eugene Fink’s prophecy that Emīlija would die from starvation in a foreign land (which served to be true) weaves through the narrative as a red thread. With this strong woman at the centre of the story, the film shows Latvian society in all its richness and gives the audience the opportunity to meet many well-known historical figures.