Having grown up in the Soviet Union, there are several truths Zelma has heard since childhood: you shall save your virginity for marriage; you shall dress like a girl; you shall pretend to be less intelligent than your husband; you shall cook; you shall love your children more than your husband… and so on. Zelma tries to follow these commandments, but her body, with its neurons and biochemical processes, gets in the way of how society has raised her.

This film is animation director Signe Baumane’s most ambitious work. It is a musical about human biology that celebrates the cycle of falling in love, getting married, and getting divorced. Like Rocks in My Pockets (2014), this ironic, imaginative, and therapeutic film is loosely based on the director’s own experience. Having screened at the Tribeca and Annecy film festivals, it meditates on how pop culture, upbringing, and social pressures act together to perpetuate the myth of everlasting love and soulmates. Zelma is stuck in a state of confusion: a complete and all-consuming love has to exist! This is what the mythological sirens, pop singers in Baumane’s interpretation, profess in their songs, sprinkling crumbs of hope.

Jury statement: Our Special Mention goes to a film full of creative details, honesty, and self-irony. The topic is nothing less than the question of what it means to navigate the world as a female, a world divided “in two” (on a personal as well as on a political level), a world with an East and a West, a world in which the “I” is surrounded by a multitude of “Others” who make suggestions (and exert pressure) about gender at an age when you first start to develop signs of your sex. Using amazing graphic miniatures (accompanied by the shock and delight of cultural soundscapes) this feature length animation tackles the tasks and chances of looking at life without blinders (and one’s own life on top of that) in a witty combination of entertainment and education. It continuously opens up new playgrounds where the micro and macro converge, where biology meets society and scientific subjectivity. Coming back to the question of marriage after having pushed the boundaries of the cinematic universe with discourses about pornography and more, the director’s latest film is brave, intelligent, feminist, and sincere. The jury’s Special Mention goes to the subtle story of My Love Affair with Marriage by Latvia’s and the world’s one and only Signe Baumane.