RIGA IFF screening at the Rothko Museum: director Marija Kreicere’s film The Gentle Monster

From October 17 to 25, four exclusive screenings at the Mark Rothko Museum will offer a refined selection of world cinema, featuring internationally acclaimed films praised by critics and audiences alike, all of which can be seen this autumn in the program of the Riga International Film Festival (RIGA IFF).

The festival program in Daugavpils will begin on October 17 with award-winning director Małgorzata Szumowska's film The Gentle Monster (Doux Monstre). The psychological drama that shook the Cannes Film Festival follows musician Lucie, whose family life falls apart when police begin investigating her husband for a sex crime. Léa Seydoux shines in the title role as the director slowly and ruthlessly dissects the boundaries of trust, intimacy, and the unknown.

On October 18, audiences will see one of this year’s Berlinale favorites, Austrian director Markus Schleinzer’s black-and-white portrait drama Rose, in which a woman dares to put on trousers, thereby claiming the economic and social freedoms that were so self-evident to men in 17th-century Germany. With Sandra Hüller in the title role, Rose’s struggle against prejudice becomes a story that resonates today about gender, identity, and the desire for self-determination.

On October 24, Polish directing master Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland will take viewers into the 1949 journey of Nobel Prize-winning writer Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika through the two postwar Germanies. A visceral drama of ideas, sharply relevant in its worldview, has brought the director his second Best Director award at Cannes. For some, it will be an encounter with a cult writer, infused with screen poetry; for others, a chilling realization that history never stops circling back.

On October 25, the festival program at the Mark Rothko Museum will conclude with Láns Hammer’s Queen at Sea, a nuanced, Berlinale-awarded chamber drama spanning three generations, in which a story about a mother’s dementia unfolds into a humane, at times uncomfortable conversation about love, autonomy, care, and responsibility. An outstanding ensemble brings the finely layered screenplay to life in close-up: Juliette Binoche, Florence Hunt (Bridgerton), as well as Tom Courtenay (45 Years) and Anna Calder-Marshall, who won the shared Best Supporting Performance award in Berlin.