Eighty-two-year-old Juris Kalniņš has found his name in the archives of the Committee for State Security of the Latvian SSR (VDK), where he is identified as an informant. Both during the Soviet era and today, he remains an uncompromising free thinker who has devoted most of his life to photographing people and documenting the spirit of the times. With the camera now turned towards Juris, he is ready to delve into his past to understand how his name could have ended up on a KGB file. What makes a person an informant – a piece of paper, mere suspicion, the opinions of others, or one’s own actions?

The film is a portrait with a slight detour into history. After winning the SWH Radio Audience Award at last year’s Riga IFF competition for The Observer (2025), Kalniņš returns to his cinematic protagonist – his father, Juris – to revisit his story and question him once more. Even though lustration in Latvia has failed to fully expose those who shook hands with the regime, the question of collaboration remains as pressing today as it was yesterday. Structured around interviews and conversations, the film explores the contradictions between a person’s understanding of their own life and an archival document that suddenly casts their lived experience in a different light. The gaze is itself a testimony. The director is interested not only in who his father is, but in what becomes of a person after an era has run its course.