Director: Pēteris Krilovs
Country: Latvia, 2026.
Length: 75 min.
Genre: Documentary film
Age rating: 16+
On a poetic canvas of history and the present, film and theater director Krilovs blends the personal with the political. By staging history and creating a portrait of artist Raimonds Staprāns, the question is raised: what is the artist’s responsibility at the curtain of history?
On the shore of the Baltic Sea stands a small red barn. It is a metaphor for the Latvian émigré artist Raimonds Staprāns, called an expressionist of realism. The barn has taken on real form, becoming a historical laboratory not only for the events of Latvian and European history, but also a point of reference for the life of a vivid, tenacious, and untamed artist. Alongside it, the colors of San Francisco, the palette of Latvia, past, present, fiction film, and documentary textures interweave.
Krilovs is a master of staged documentary cinema, who has created such canonical works as “Klucis. The Wrong Latvian” (2008) and “Latvia in the Crosshairs” (2014). The author has always been interested in the concept of personal responsibility and in people whose lives sharpen questions about the era. The protagonist of his latest documentary is Staprāns, who fled his homeland at the beginning of the Soviet occupation and went to the United States, became a recognized artist, and wrote plays about Latvian history. Both Krilovs and Staprāns are united by an interest in historical figures, and naturally in the film these characters, played by actors Imants Strads, Kaspars Zvīgulis and others, come to life and ask questions of their creator. The film reveals Staprāns not only as a thinker and painter, but also as a playwright, one with a keen and philosophical interest in Latvia while living on the other side of the ocean.
In the centenary year of Staprāns (1926–2026), several events are taking place that reveal his work, personality, and life. Recently the book “46 Episodes With and Without Irony” was published, and in Riga, at the Latvian National Museum of Art, the exhibition “Raimonds Staprāns. Architecture of Silence” is on view.
The film is in Latvian and English with Latvian subtitles.
