Audiences in the Baltics and around the world are now offered a personal perspective on the everyday life of the Russian-speaking community in Riga by watching the 2023 film Everything Will Be Alright online. The honest and intense depiction of his own family was captured by director Stanislavs Tokalovs, who grew up in a family of Latvians of Russian origin. He collaborated on the film with cameraman and co-screenwriter Valdis Celmiņš (nominee of the prestigious IMAGO International Award) over a period of five years. The film received five nominations for the Latvian National Film Award „Lielais Kristaps” and was honored with the title of the best full-length documentary of the year. Additionally, the film received the award for best film editing, which was presented to the film’s editor, Stefans Stabenovs. The award-winning film is globally available for rent on the RIGA IFF Collection online platform online.rigaiff.lv.

The Latvian audience admired the film’s vulnerable, fresh, and non-didactic approach in shedding light on integration policy and historical memory in Latvia. Simultaneously, the film offers a much-needed perspective on how to heal the divide within the country’s population. As Tokalov provides a close-up of the daily life of his multigenerational family household and the realities they grapple with, the film poses apt questions, allowing the viewer space for their own interpretation and answers.

The director explains the idea of the film as follows:

I started making the film because it seemed to me that my colleagues, in depicting the Russian-speaking minority in Latvia, never showed the spectrum of experience that I, as a representative of this group, saw. I wanted to change the angle and shed a broader light on this group of people. We started shooting four and a half years ago, not knowing that Russia would invade Ukraine, that the Covid pandemic was about to start, or that the Victory Monument would be demolished. Naturally, we show these events in the film as they have a strong impact on the lives of the characters.

Ninety-year-old Nina, the director’s grandmother, is the symbol of the family. Her nostalgia for the Soviet Union is soothed by 9 May celebrations that used to gather crowds chanting wartime songs at the foot of the Victory Park monument. Everything Will Be Alright also focuses on her daughter Irina, who struggles to raise her adult daughter, attempts to hold her marriage together with her husband Raul, all the while supporting her aging mother and caring for her family as best she can. The TV is always on in the backdrop of their apartment in the Purvciems, a neighbourhood of Riga, and sometimes depicts Vladimir Putin.

The creative director of RIGA IFF and creator of the festival program, Sonora Broka, praises Tokalov’s work:

This is the best exposition of the topic in Latvian cinema history. The director’s openness and the intimacy of the footage, as it shows carefully observed fragments of everyday moments, reach out and speak to the viewer very directly.

The award-winning film is globally available for rent on the RIGA IFF Collection online platform online.rigaiff.lv.