BBFF Dispatch #3: Is It Easy to Be … Trilogy

The Boston Baltic Film Festival runs from Friday, 2/28 through Sunday, 3/2 at the Emerson Paramount Center, and through 3/17 virtually. Click here for the schedule and ticket info, and watch the site for Joshua Polanski’s continuing coverage!

The following dispatch features reviews of Is It Easy to Be Young?, Is It Easy to Be… After Ten Years, and Is It Easy…? After 20 Years.

An easy way to evaluate the impact of the original Is It Easy to Be Young?, the documentary that Juris Podnieks finished in 1986, is with a quick look at its two sequels, directed by Antra Cilinska ten and twenty years after the original. Very few documentaries receive sequels, and of the ones that do, it would be surprising if the original film were as discursive as this one, refusing the New York Times house-style voice-of-God approach so dominant in mainstream documentaries. Not only did Podnieks’ original film documenting the lives of brave and confidently incorrigible young adults in Latvia during perestroika and a growing national awakening movement (Atmoda) generate two sequels, it is also a key part of his larger legacy that resulted in the bio-pic Podnieks on Podnieks: A Witness to History, which opens this year’s BBFF and will be playing online from 3/3 through 3/17. That makes Is It Easy to Be Young—showing at the festival in its beautiful 2023 restoration—a staple in Baltic cinema.

Podnieks doesn’t narrate or even introduce his interview subjects, let alone follow a “plot” from start to finish, a point where the sequels diverge. Is It Easy to Be Young? collects and uplifts the voices of Latvia’s youth in 1986, moving in and out of topic as quickly as the subjects do. From a young filmmaker (Igors Linga) to a kerfuffle-inducing band and a young mother, no facets of life hide from relevancy. Podnieks and his crew don’t reduce their influence on their interviewees, and can often be spotted and heard as they ask questions to the young adults about impermissible topics. Exceeding any sociological interest regarding life in Latvia on the heels of glasnost and perestroika, Podnieks’ political salience excavates a rebellious hopefulness in the Latvian youth of the times and establishes itself as one of the most important Latvian films of all time. After all, how many documentaries can you think of that have two sequels?...

Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.

After Podnieks’ death in 1992, his plans to revisit the ten people in the original film were not abandoned by his colleagues. His colleagues created the Juris Podnieks Studio, and his editor and colleague Antra Cilinska oversaw their productions. Two films to come out of the independent studio bearing his name were Is It Easy to Be… After Ten Years and Is It Easy…? After 20 Years, the latter of which mysteriously drops the “to be” from the shared title. Both follow up with the interviewees from Podnieks’ Is It Easy to Be Young?

The main fascination is watching these young people transform into middle-aged adults. There were ten years between their releases, but they work best as a package absorbed altogether. Their lives move between tragedy and success in a flash. The baby in the first one grows up before our eyes and becomes a young adult herself, a shockingly touching testament to the fleeting brevity of life. The saddest development might be the way the still-developing capitalism transforms many of their relationships to their jobs. One woman, a cake baker in the first film, now has to sell her body to make ends meet; another forsakes his citizenship and disappears. Others find themselves making good on the promise of capitalism for better, self-made lives. My favorite of these is the filmmaker Igors Linga, who by the third entry is an award-winning music video director...

Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.