An urban fresco. A food delivery worker, a tram driver, and a young girl — each making their way through the city on a summer day. Their movements are captured in little slide films. Gulls, Riga Central Market, the sushi you ordered, the No. 7 tram, sad cigarette butts, Soviet housing blocks, waffles, Hipokrāta Street, old and rusty trains, and then — checkmate. All of it spells out Riga.

Drawing on the longstanding tradition of poetic documentary cinema of Riga and the “city symphony” genre, Brīvulis opens a portal into animation, composing a series of free-form visual verses dedicated to his hometown. A year ago, the animation director, now pursuing a master’s degree at the Art Academy of Latvia, delighted RIGA IFF audiences with clean cinema — the short film Cleanliness (2025), a celebration of the everyday that has screened in Annecy, Zagreb, Tallinn, and elsewhere. Brīvulis’s bachelor’s graduation film, selected for this year’s competition, discovers micro-stories in the most unlikely moments and side streets, observing them with an irresistibly warm eye as they blossom into something larger than life.