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THE STORY OF A LATVIAN FILM

The feature film “Graduation Year”, also known as “The Lesson”, continued the festival film program in the Cinema House. The work by the young Latvian filmmaker Andris Gauja won success at film festivals in Montreal, Chicago, Bergen, Cottbus and the Russian “Kinoshock”.

Andris Gauja is known not only as a director, but also as a composer, scriptwriter, producer and film editor. The film is his first full-length work. Planned in 2010 as a documentary project about contemporary Latvian schools, it turned into a feature film. From the original idea it took only pseudo-documentary style and shooting with hand-held camera in a real school.

“Graduation Year” is a romantic, but largely criticized story about relations between a teacher of the Russian language Zane (Inga Alsina) and her student Max (Andrei Smolyakov) from a graduating class. The action takes place in Riga.

The film became a box office hit nationally. Only in Latvia it was watched by at least 100 thousand people. After that “Graduation Year” participated in a dozen international film festivals and was shown around the world.

The work on the film wasn’t easy. To get money for making the film the director and his colleagues sold bananas! In the end, the state provided financial support.

We wish the director good luck in the future projects, and the film “The Graduation Year” to win many prestigious awards.

Marina Hlyabich