Movies: Jānis Ābele

Film takes us deep inside the world of Latvian teenagers in 90s: combining the intimate diary of a teenager Jānis trying to find himself by joining a subculture, as well as a skillful, detailed and almost documentary-like depiction of the beginnings ...

A problem that every film director has faced – how do you film something that does not exist? A director is making a documentary about an actor and his stalker – but the stalker never appears. As the deadline approaches, unusual steps must be taken....

...

Two twenty-somethings from Latvia meet in the south of France. Leo studies restoration, Anna has lived in Marseille for some time and works as a hairdresser. Also, she looks very much like the image of a girl that Leo has uncovered restoring an altar...

The heroine is a widow and a fiancé who wants to begin a new and happy life. Conflicts in her family’s past prevent it, but she does not give up – she wants to clear away the ruins and do what she can. “Enough of looking for guilt, it’s time to find ...

Anatols Imermanis was a Latvian crime writer and a poet during Soviet occupation. He could call himself a successful, financially stable soviet writer. But he wanted more – to be free. The free West, especially Paris, was a life-long dream for Imerma...

The young Jekabs, Linda and Rihards enjoy the spring full of romance and bohemian way of life. The apple-trees are in blossom in Riga and the war unavoidably approaches....

Two girls on holiday find a diary in an abandoned boat and set out to investigage a mysterious light on the horizon....

This documentary portrait film reflects the work of photographer Juris Kalniņš during the Soviet era and in the present day, and looks for the points of connection between these two different regimes, providing a biographical, factual and artistic in...

A melancholic view facing a mirror of water. It deceives the film’s protagonist, who wallows in longing and memories of his lost lover. The water here takes on the shape of a tear, a trickle through fallen leaves, the volume of a drink left undrunk i...

A documentary essay examining the creative process of creating a book from the writer's first thought to the printing of the typescript....

Spring 2021. A cinephile invites you on an intimate trip through the last surviving cinema houses in Latvia. This documentary essay, shot on super 8mm, opens the locked doors to picture houses during a Covid-19 lockdown, perhaps the most difficult ti...

An ordinary old folks’ home on the Latvian border – one of many, where our parents, grand-parents and other relatives spend their old age. Theirs is the generation whose prime years co-existed with the Soviet Union, and who were promised: work, give ...