lv The 20th century dreamt about utopia, but instead it experienced tragedies — a look at the artist and playwright Raimonds Staprāns’ nearly century-long experience of trying to define living and statehood. We split the personality of the San Francisco-based Latvian artist into three parts: a brilliant painter; an unusual playwright; and a sharp, original observer of Latvia. We take one of his paintings, “Barn with the Red Door”, and construct an exact replica; and take the characters from Staprans’ plays and ask actors to perform the roles. Keeping in mind the symbolically charged image of the Red Barn, we deliberately cause arguments between the actors, the director and the crew about the historic motivations of the characters, as well as alternative actions or decisions that they could have taken but did not.
Type of work: Film
Genre: Documentary
Stage: In production
Producers: Uldis Cekulis (Company VFS Films)
Looking for: Co-producers, co-financiers, sales agent, festivals
Contacts: uldis@vfs.lv
Uldis Cekulis created the independent production company VFS FILMS more than twenty years ago. He has worked on almost 50 creative documentaries both as a producer and as a cameraman. His recent Italian-Latvian coproduction “The Rossellinis’ (Alessandro Rossellini) premiered at 77 th Venice IFF. In 2021 his first production feature “UPURGA” by Ugis Olte premiered at Black Nights IFF.
Pēteris Krilovs is a renowned Latvian film and theater director, drama teacher, and pro-rector of the Latvian Academy of Culture. He graduated from the Moscow State Institute of Cinematography. Since then he has directed a dozen fiction and documentary films and received a Best Director award at the Latvian National Film Festival in 2009 and 2014.
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