Tesa Man
The music speaks clearly enough.
One of the most exciting filmmakers working in the Baltics, Uģis Olte’s still youthful career has already taken him far and wide. Other than the prominent place he reserves for music, the topics and tones of his early work vary considerably. From a documentary about the first rock band to play in North Korea (following the ex-Yugoslavian band Laibach in Liberation Day), to a folkloric horror-thriller in Livonia with River of Fear I (2021), and with his newest film, Tesa Man, to fully experimental terrain, Olte makes memorable images that refuse to fizzle with the credits.
With his newest and boldest film, he shoots a silent film of a post-metal band performing in the middle of nowhere Latvia as some mysterious woman emerges, through the musical ritual, from nothing into something marvellous. It might be a mistake to call Tesa Man a silent film, though, since the notes and rifts of Tesa, a Latvian instrumental post-metal band, somehow speak. It even took me a few minutes to notice that the feelings the film was generating within me were completely driven by the combination of the images and the music with no dialogue, or really even characters, to contribute.
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