BBFF Dispatch #5: Period Pictures

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

The following dispatch features reviews of Southern Chronicles & Maria’s Silence.

Latvia’s Flow just became the first ever Baltic film to bring home an Academy Award, but it’s not the only film from the region making waves this year. Southern Chronicles, a multi-genre period piece set in the Southern city of Šiauliai, became the most seen film in the history of (independent) Lithuanian cinemas. In the very early post-Soviet years, high school rugby player Rimants (Džiugas Grinys) balances his sports success, first loves, and normal small city problems while his city and country navigate rapid social change.

An adaptation of a popular book by Rimantas Kmita and a major achievement in Lithuanian cinema for using the local dialect rather than the standardized language, Southern Chronicles wears its literary origins on its sleeves. Rimants’s biggest romantic interest, Monika (Digna Kulionytė), is the smartest girl in Šiauliai, and she has a bright future—one too bright for a “dumb” jock. The Rimants we meet at the story’s beginning reads, too… erotica, that is. To impress Monika, he picks up reading more serious literature as a hobby and gradually learns to appreciate books for their own sake...

Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.

Marija Leiko became an international silver screen star in the Weimar Republic and continued her success through the early Nazi years. She was the biggest Latvian actor in the movies of the time, and had even been in F.W. Murnau’s Satan. In 1937, a retired Marija (or Maria) traveled to the Soviet Union to identify the body of her daughter. On arrival, she learned that she was a grandmother, and that her daughter died in childbirth. It would take quite some time for her granddaughter’s paperwork to be ready for her travel back to Germany. She stayed in Moscow while she waited, working in the Latvian State Theatre (Skatuve). Marija was never permitted to leave the USSR, her passport invalidated, and on February 3, 1938, Marija was executed at the age of 49 as part of a Stalinist purge of political opponents and buried in a mass grave outside Moscow. This is the true story that Dāvis Sīmanis Jr. (The Mover; Escaping Riga) brings to the screen for the first time in Maria’s Silence.

A relatively unknown Olga Šepicka plays Marija during the infamous final years of her life. She plays Marija with an irony of confidence and hesitancy fitting for a foreign movie star held hostage in another country. Gļebs Beļikovs, another newer face in Latvian cinema, plays Nikolai Yezhov (or Nikolajs Jezovs), an officer of the secret police and one of the bigwigs behind the Great Purge, and he captivates in his short screen time. His onscreen personality is reminiscent of Daniel Brühl, only in Latvian and Russian. One more scene and Sīmanis Jr would risk the actor stealing the show. Hopefully we will see more of him in the future...

Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.