Marking the 75th anniversary of the birth of documentary filmmaker and figure of the Awakening period, Juris Podnieks (1950–1992), this exhibition personally reflects upon and analyses the author’s filmography, imagery, era, its sensibility and sense of belonging.

The creative team approaches the exhibition through visuality, the charismatic personality of Podnieks and the transformative socio-political context of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as layers of photography, film and video. It will introduce visitors to testimonies found in Podnieks’ negative collection on traces of how his cinematic gaze was formed, his collaborations with colleagues, strong personalities who influenced his creative work, as well as the circle of contemporaries in the cultural landscape of Latvia.

Podnieks started out as a cinematographer at Riga Film Studio, shooting newsreels and documentary films. His cinematography for The Forbidden Zone (1975) by Herz Frank earned him a diploma from the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, but soon after, with the thematic newsreel The Cradle (Soviet Latvia No. 3, 1977), Podnieks made his debut as a director.

Since the early 1980s, each of his films was a significant artistic and social event. The impact of Is It Easy to Be Young? (1986) reached far beyond the context of Latvian cinema – it resonated throughout the entire Soviet system, becoming one of the driving forces towards the collapse of the empire. It was Podnieks, together with his colleagues and contemporaries, who documented this turning point in We and Crossroad (1990), seeking a new visual language for an era and people striving for freedom and independence.

The Juris Podnieks Year programme is coordinated by the Latvian Film Museum of the Latvian Academy of Culture. The project is supported by the State Culture Capital Foundation. The Spacetime of Podnieks exhibition was created with the support of the Latvian State Archive of Audiovisual Documents.