GO TO: Faithful unto Death (2024) dir. Ivars Zviedris

Faithful unto Death will be having its North American premiere this Saturday, May 17, at the West Newton Cinema. A Q&A with director Ivars Zviedris and editor Haralds Ozols will follow the screening. The screening is a co-presentation by the Global Cinema Film Festival and the Boston Baltic Film Festival.

A woman in rural Latvia lived 27 years with a surgeon’s tool tucked away in her abdomen following an appendectomy. The strange, fascinating, and disturbing fact fits the wild life of Mara, the woman at the center of Ivars Zviedris’s new documentary about poor and elderly pensioners in rural Latvia, Faithful unto Death. Such insanity is only a blip in her eventful life.

Mara, now 72, married four times and in each instance saw her vows through to their conclusion, “unto death.” One of her husbands met a particularly tragic end. Her current partner is the sloth-like Ivars, a man with the same personal name as the director, though they are very much different people. It’s worth mentioning since Ivars Zviedris always makes himself known in his docs. The couple doesn’t get along well — Ivars jokingly refuses to marry her for fear of ending up like her late husbands — but they also have no other options. They are dependent on each other, financially and otherwise. He needs her more than she needs him, for sure, but she also needs something to give her purpose, and complaining about him to her friend Austra does that.

Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.