“TRAINS” AND “EVERYTHING NEEDS TO LIVE” AWARDED AT LATVIAN FESTIVAL
The documentary by Tetiana Dorodnitsyna and Andrii Lytvynenko was made so masterfully that both filmmakers received the Best Director Award at ArtDocFest/Riga. In the Baltic Focus section, the top honour went to the latest documentary by Maciej Drygas.
ArtDocFest/Riga is an international documentary film festival held in Riga, Latvia, forming part of a larger event that is ArtDocFest. It is one of Eastern Europe's most significant film gatherings, focusing on independent and socially engaged documentary productions. The festival promotes freedom of expression and creative courage, showcasing films that tackle controversial political, social, and humanitarian issues. Amidst political tensions and pressure from Russian authorities, the festival has become an important symbol of artistic freedom and the fight for human rights.
The winner of Baltic Focus, Trains opens with a quote from Franz Kafka: “There is hope, infinite hope – just not for us.” These words hover like a dark cloud over this documentary composed of archival materials, which creates a collective portrait of people in 20th-century Europe, capturing their hopes, desires, dramas, and tragedies. Powerful scenes showing the assembly of steam locomotives and railway carriages appear to celebrate human ingenuity and labour. People dressed in their finest clothes embark on railway journeys. But these joyful images soon give way to military transport: soldiers being deployed to the front line ≠ quickly followed by civilian evacuations, processions of ragged prisoners of war and amputee soldiers. Times change, but the pattern keeps repeating. The archival footage in Maciej J. Drygas's silent film evokes an inevitable sense of a cycle of joy and destruction, beauty and bitterness. The image of a tangle of railway tracks and switches raises the question: which route is humanity going to choose?
The Best Director Award winner Everything Needs to Live portrays the extraordinary everyday life of Anna Kurkurina, a charismatic athlete, “the world's strongest woman”, an animal rights activist and out lesbian. From her earliest years, Anna has demonstrated an exceptional bond with animals. She taught biology at school, worked at the local zoo where she befriended a lion, helped in establishing shelters, and found new homes for dozens of stray animals. After turning forty, she decided to embark on a career as a powerlifter and soon climbed to the top, becoming a triple world champion. She also began working as a coach for young people with disabilities. Since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, leveraging her popularity in the world of sports and as an influencer, Anna has continued to help injured and abandoned animals, following her motto: whoever saves one life, saves the entire world.
You can find the list of all awarded films here.