On Thursday, 8 December, RIGA IFF will screen the innovative “anti-thriller” Pacifiction at Kino Citadele. The film is Albert Serra’s (Liberté, 2019) latest success straight from this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Sonora Broka, the Artistic Director of RIGA IFF, will introduce the screening, giving a background to the film where cataclysmic intrigues brew under a Pacific Ocean lit up by the sunset.

Albert Serra might only have begun his career in this century but has already earned a reputation as intellectual provocateur with a filmography of eleven works. The Spanish filmmaker has even been called “the most French non-French filmmaker” at the Cannes Film Festival.

The protagonist of the fictional Pacification is the French High Commissioner De Roller (played by Benoît Magimel, one of the leading actors in Michael Haneke’s legendary The Piano Teacher, 2001). He has the unusual job of keeping the peace in the colonised territory of Tahiti and be friendly with the locals without losing control. Dressed in a white suit, he wanders through nightclubs crowded with humid bodies and beaches drenched in redish light, trying to reassure everyone that disaster is impossible. Meanwhile, a deadly secret hides in the depths of the ocean that turns the idyllic peacefulness into an uneasy calm before the storm.

The uniqueness of the film lies in its range – Pacification is possibly the sunniest art-house horror film made this year, or maybe the most peaceful political thriller. Regardless of the viewer’s perception, the core of the film is a psychologically layered drama. It asks valid questions about power relations, colonial legacy, and the choice to overlook or hide an ambition for power so strong that it draws people’s lives and destinies into it like a whirlpool.

This screening opens the film’s limited theatrical run from 15 to 19 December at Kino Citadele. Read more about the film on rigaiff.lv/fikcija.