Although the movie 24 Hours of the Sun Shines is marketed as a comedy drama, it doesn’t have situations where you can scream about just staged jokes. As the director Juris Poškus himself said, his films (he also shot “Monotonija” and “Kolka Cool”) are funny comedies because “making funny films has never been my personal goal. Rather, it is my vision of the world, which some people find funny. And my films can be tragedies. We laugh at things only because they happen to others. If it happens to ourselves, laughter will no longer come” (“Ir” magazine, March 16 – 23).
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Sometimes in life it’s like that: everything seems to be there, and yet there is a nagging feeling that something more is needed, something is still missing. It is with the main character of the film. Mārtiņš (Andris Keiš) is tired of working. He successfully sells his business and persuades his friends to go on a joint adventure – a trip to the North Pole. Finding himself alone at the airport, he is faced with a choice: return to everyday life or embark on an adventure… Almost the entire film is spent in a long wait: will Mārtiņš finally reach the coveted North Pole, and what will happen next? Will life change? It seems that everything will return to the old tracks and the most interesting and exciting thing was the path to the imaginary goal of happiness.
This movie would be worth watching if only for the great actors. The film captivates not only the charming actor Andris Keišs (he has said that it is his best film role) in the role of Martin, but also the actors of episodic roles, who are really like delicious raisins on the holiday cake: Andis Strod in the role of a tormented husband, Amundsen’s successor Kurt as the Norwegian actor Trunn Played by Halbu, the femme fatale Arctic played by Yulia Volkova, played by Juris Bartkevich, the clever man who plans to turn to politics. The co-producer of the film, Vlad Ketkovic, who played the colorful Arctic guide “pizhik”, who dreams of “Brazil, carnival, gjorls…” was especially excited.
True, the fact that the film was partly shot in Russia and was made in cooperation with its colleagues may seem contradictory in the background of today’s politics, however, it should be taken into account that it was shot in 2018 and 2019 in Latvia and in the Far North of Russia – in the city of Tiksi, Yakutia. It was a time when the covid pandemic had not yet started and there were no horrors of war in Ukraine.
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I find it significant that the pole looks like other places in the Arctic. It turns out that the main character of the film, who is aiming for the North Pole as a new goal in his life, meets “nothing” there. As the bartender of the Tiksi cafe says in the movie, “there’s nothing there”! So every person has to look for that “something” within himself.
JURIS POŠKUS, film director
2023-05-21 19:56:34
#Good #luck #North #Pole
