On Friday, a memorial plaque in honor of the director Juris Podnieks was erected at 10 Meistaru Street in Riga, the organizers of the memorial plaque opening event informed.
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On December 5, the legendary documentary filmmaker Podnieks would turn 70 years old. The plaque was installed near the house where the director worked in the last years of his life.
The author of the memorial plaque is the sculptor Jānis Strupulis. The bronze bas-relief was made on the basis of one of the last photographs by Podnieks, taken by the Latvian classic of photography Vilhelms Mihailovskis. In it, Podnieks is looking at Bastejkalns, where in January 1991 his group’s cinematographers Andris Slapiņš and Gvido Zvaigzne went to their last filming.
The potter tragically divorced on June 23, 1992. On this day he did not return from underwater hunting in Lake Zvirgzdu. The director’s body was found in the lake on the eighth day. The official version reports that there was an accident caused by a damaged scuba and heart failure in Podnieks.
Potter is one of the most famous Latvian documentary filmmakers. He received his first accolades for his work as a cinematographer in Herz Frank’s films “Over 10 Minutes” and “Restricted Zone”. As a director, he became famous for his author of the film “Sagittarius Constellation”. The film “Is it easy to be young?” Brought him real world fame.
Compiling the five-hour epic “We”, Podnieks bypassed all the hotspots of the crushing empire and essentially created the chronicle of the collapse of the USSR.
The initiator of the installation of the memorial plaque is a journalist and the author of a book dedicated to Podnieks, Tatjana Fasta. According to her, Podnieks was a man thanks to whom Latvia gained independence. The shots taken by him and Alexander Demchenko with a special operation of Soviet troops in Lithuania in January 1991 flew around the world and stopped the same operation in Latvia. “People like Juris must not be forgotten,” Fasta stressed.
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