Respect you, Arvids Krievs – a director with a mysterious handwriting (+ VIDEO)

Celebrating the 80th birthday of the director Arvididas Krievas, a film collection was created on the films.lv portal at the National Cinema Center, which highlights the most important films of the director during his fifty years of creative activity , – six full-time feature films (1981-2011), two short films from his study years (1978,1979) and eight documentaries (1974-2018). From August 26, the film collection will be available for free throughout Latvia.

The film director Arvids Krievs (1944) stands out in the history of Latvian cinema as one of the most unique, creative directors with no name, his first documentary films and studio works already attracted the attention of fellow professionals, and so this anniversary collection begins with short films from the 70s of the 20th century. At that time, a young director without a specific film education could only make educational films and commissioned films, but Arvids Krievs proved that it is possible even in this field which seems to be limited to a certain extent. high art, his short documentary films “Pūra lāde” (1974) and “Nature” (1976) even international evaluation – that’s how we can call recognition at the All-Union film festivals at the time.

Arvids Krievs entered the Riga film studio in the most basic way, it can be said, since 1964, in practical work, he learned various professions that were needed on the set, but there was still more work to required formal education, and in 1977 the young aspirant enrolled in the Higher Courses of Screenwriters and Directors in Moscow – at that time in a prestigious “professional training” institution. His short films during his studies left an even clearer impression on his contemporaries – after the coursework “Pasarkans vakirins” (1978), about the legends that circulated in the film studio long after that, and the diploma thesis short film “Guilty” (1979). ) based on the themes of Rudolf Blaumanis, which was also shown to a wider audience, many noticed the young director Arvidas Krievas and allowed him to work on the first full-time film, and his script was based on the popular novel “Kailums” (1970) by Zigmunds Skujinis.

Director Arvids Kriev’s handwritten secret tension feature is clearly shown in two of his most popular films of the 80s – the crime drama “Raspberry Wine” (1984), which received the Great Audience Award Kristaps once, and the exciting perestroika period. film “Photography with a Woman and a Wild Boar” (1987). he also plays the male lead in Arvid Krieva’s next feature film, the melodrama “Ieva’s Paradise Garden” (1990), based on Arvid Grigul’s dramatic 1930s novel “People in the Garden”.

With the passage of time, we can assume that the director Arvididas Krievas has a special intuition in seeing actors – in the feature film “I like that a sad girl” (2004) he found out that the person has the talent of a film actor. the popular musician Mārtiņš Freimanis, so in the next film, the historical drama “Dancer pa trim” (2011) gave double roles to Mārtiņš Freimans and Kristīna Nevarauskas that connect the two periods of the film – the today and the relationship problems during the Second World War.

A group of like-minded people is always important to Arvid Kriev in his creative activity, so he has maintained a long-term collaboration both with his special actors (including Rudolph Plēpi, Indra Burkovskis, Juri Strenga, Ines Pabērz and others) and his special composer Mārtis Braun, and the association of the director with the cinematographer Dāvi Sīmanis senior – since they met in 1974 in “Pūras lādė” Hardly that Sīmanis and Krievs have separated, Sīmanis has recorded 13 films out of 16 that are included in this anniversary collection and in two of them he has contributed such a unique work that he has also recognized as co-author of the screenplay in the credits – both in the feature film Ieva’s Paradise Garden, as well as in the documentary film “Basi”. There is such a place in “Kurzeme” (1988), a quiet and beautiful everyday view of a rural summer. Dāvis Sīmanis has also worked on three recent documentaries in this collection – the portrait of the famous photographer “Photo: Inta Ruka” (2003), the story of the extended family of the actress Indra Burkovska “Father, radi, machine hit” (2006) and a portrait sketch of the musician Mārtiņš Freimanis “Life as Brightness” (2006).

The films included in the anniversary collection of director Arvidas Krievas can be seen for free throughout Latvia from August 26. The collection was supported by the State Film Photographic Document Archive of the National Archives of Latvia and the Cultural Information Systems Center (KISC), which ensures the technical functioning of the portal. The portal films.lv, which is also a comprehensive database of the film industry, is created and maintained by the National Cinema Center.