Laila Pakalnina, the Latvian auteur praised for her documentary work, finds splendour in the ordinary, everyday presence of a plastic spoon. The national premiere of Spoon will take place within the Riga IFF Feature Film Competition on October 24.

The film is both a lament and a satire: Spoon exposes the amount of waste that goes into the creation of something that will inevitably be disposed of shortly after the use, while also portraying how psychologically affected humans are by the process of creating something so ordinary. Her works being selected for almost all A-class film festivals in the world, Pakalniņa remarks that this feature is not so much about spoons, as it is about what she defines as a real film. Cinematographer Gints Berzins emphasises that film was black and white from the very outset, considering the black oil and white plastic as its subject matter.

From extraction of oil and processing it into plastic, to casting it into its final shape – Spoon takes something so small and insignificant, and imbues it with a life and meaning far beyond its intended use. The single-use plastic utensil being a global phenomenon, the Spoon has the widest location coverage that Pakalinina has done to date – Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Azerbaijan, China, and Hong Kong.