Uģis Olte: Every program and film I have created is my own experience

Many films, shows, music videos have been made under his auspices. As a director, he stands out with a signature touch of nature, mythology and an elusive tradition. He has created famous films – “Sacrifice”, “Liberation Day”, “Double Strangers” and the new work “Tesa Man”. He has also participated in the production of Latvian Television programs for several years. The latest of them – “Garainis” began its journey to LTV1 viewers this week. Director Uģis Olte in this conversation about great art, masculinity in art, the power of nature and the language of cinema.

Just this week, the premiere of the program “Garainis” under your direction, which is the older brother of the long-running program “Literature”, will be broadcast on LTV. Is the name “Garainis” connected to Imantas Ziedonis book “Garainis, kos komprod vāriņės”?

We won’t tell anyone that, but basically it’s his saying about the tall man who burns the boil. This word really stuck with us when we were thinking about the concept of the show. Not as “Spirit”, but as “Spirit”. We were thinking about spiritual things, but there will also be long shots. Garaniis is something mobile, flexible, volatile – what happens in the heads of artists. For six years, we created the “Literature” program, which is about writers and poets. We created a journey in which you get an emotional feeling of what the writer thinks and how he works. We had the opportunity to meet literature teachers, who said that our program is useless because there are no facts. This is the best proposal for me, because we are not trying to create a wikipedia page, but we want to achieve an emotional image, a feeling, responding to what it means to be an artist and something that creation This is an age where it is necessary to break down the boundaries between the arts. When I studied for my master’s degree, we were trained for two years to look at what we do with other artistic eyes. For example, we learned a lot about theatre, contemporary dance, anthropology, philosophy of art. Interdisciplinarity, which is the ability to expand boundaries, is now extremely necessary. The first episode will be about theater director Māras Ķimeli and scenic designer, graphic artist, painter Ilmars Blumbergs. The second episode is about film director Laila Pakalnin and writer Jānis Jaunsudrabin. His “White Book” is a work close to Laila Pakalnin. In general, this program is the result of “Literature”, which maintains a similar feeling and language.