Event info

The Chimney

Latvia - 2013

Once upon a time there was a chimney. By the chimney were three houses and in the three houses lived seven blonde girls. A beautiful portrait of children’s everyday adventures.

Snow Crazy

Latvia - 2012

A film about skiers in Latvia. There is only one slight drawback: there are no mountains in Latvia. The skiers don’t give up in the face of adversity and construct skiing arenas in some very bizarre conditions.

Hello Horse!

Latvia - 2017

A film about how everything changes while remaining the same. Or rather, everything remains the same while changing.

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Laila Pakalnina

Laila Pakalnina is a director and scriptwriter. She has a very definitive style, her work is both serious and humorous and it could be said that she is the Aki Kaurismäki of documentary films.

Pakalnina was born in Latvia in 1962. She studied filmmaking at the Moscow Film Institute (VGIK) and has made various types of film but mostly focused on documentaries. Pakalnina’s documentaries show a side of the world that might seem quite inconsequential. They show people going about their daily lives, skiing, fishing or playing football. Through her brilliant use of montage she shows that these daily routines are anything but uninteresting, they are packed with humor and drama. Pakalnina has been nominated for a multitude of international awards including the Palme d’Or and the Golden Bear for her short films. She has been awarded won prizes at the Latvian National Film Festival multiple times, as well as at other festivals such as Karlovy Vary and the Rome Film Fest.

Pakalnina is incredibly skilled at using imagery, sound and montage - the unique language of cinema - to tell big, multi-layered stories. Her films show daily life in a fresh and whimsical manner and invite the audience to look for the extraordinary within the ordinary.