Boston Baltic Film Festival brings daring storytelling to ArtsEmerson

Over the last year, the Latvian animated climate change thriller “Flow” has brought a tidal wave of attention to the tiny nation of less than two million people. In January, it picked up Latvia’s first Golden Globe. On March 2, the uplifting story about animals that cooperate to survive a flood will compete for two other firsts: Best International Feature and Best Animated Feature at the Academy Awards.

In celebration, “Flow” screens in Boston on March 1 as part of the Boston Baltic Film Festival, which runs in person Feb. 28-March 2 at ArtsEmerson, and virtually March 3-17. “Flow” animator Mārtiņš Upītis will attend the screening and also participate in an industry panel on Feb. 28 (which this writer will moderate) with 11 other special guests.

Exuberant over the film’s success, festival director Aija Dreimane says “Flow” demonstrates how art can bring the world together. “Art makes us more visible, politically, too. It makes [Latvia] stronger as a nation… culture is what makes you strong.”

Zoom out to include cinema from the country’s neighboring nations, Estonia and Lithuania, and the waters run just as wide and deep. This year’s 10 feature films showing in person include daring storytelling and some of the finest acting I’ve seen across so many titles at once. The takeaway? See “Flow” somehow (at press time, the screening had sold out) and read up on how its shy creator Gints Zilbalodis used open source software to create the beloved gray cat and its friends. And also consider attending one or more of the following film screenings from the Baltic region.

It’s hard to imagine an American documentarian who would inspire thousands to show up for their funeral procession. Yet when Juris Podnieks died unexpectedly in 1992, fellow Latvians crowded the streets to accompany his casket while hundreds of thousands watched his funeral on TV. Podnieks gained this admiration by creating nonfiction work that revealed the Soviet Latvian experience before independence (“Constellation of Riflemen,” 1982) and leading up to it (“Hello do you Hear Us?” 1990) from front, back, above and below. At a time when his fellow citizens were not encouraged to speak candidly, he found authentic voices. The audacity and sensitivity needed to assemble these portraits resonated within Latvia and far beyond.

Cut from what feels like a mountain of footage with archival images and diary excerpts not shared publicly before, “Podnieks” pays this influential filmmaker rightful homage, and does so almost entirely in his point of view. Directors Antra Cilinska and Anna Viduleja devote time to his ruminations on his life’s purpose that culminates in a political reckoning because Podnieks, too, held his cards close. “Podnieks” loosely follows a chronology, from his teen years as a camera operator at Riga Film Studios to a director who made documentary cool (and an unprecedented international box office success) in 1986 with “Is it Easy to be Young?” (more on that below).

A still from directors Antra Cilinska and Anna Viduleja’s documentary “Podnieks on Podnieks. A Witness to History.” (Courtesy Boston Baltic Film Festival)

Along the way, Podnieks compares his obsession with documentation to having feet tied to pedals that keep going around. He simply can’t stop and the film shows how his commitment to his homeland deepens over time, particularly as he’s able to travel to other Soviet outposts for the British series “Hello, Can you Hear Us?” In a 1991 Soviet assault in Riga on what Podnieks calls “those small islands of democracy we still possessed,” he and long-time collaborators rush in with cameras. The fatal consequences only emboldened Podnieks, who survived. At one point in the film, he asks, “Why do we hate [the young]? Why are we afraid of them?” He reveals he hoped “Is it Easy to be Young?” would help young Latvians restore faith in themselves. This film shows how that same principle informed his entire career. His camera showed people their own humanity, in a form of artistry he called “life’s arranged illusions.”

Following the in-person screening on Feb. 28, directors Antra Cilinska and Anna Viduleja will take part in a Q&A. The film also screens virtually March 3-17.

Nothing compares to film’s ability to capture the physicality of aging and the playing out of dreams, realized or not, especially when purposefully shot over decades. Documentarian Michael Apted and Paul Almond did this in the beloved “Up” series, filming 14 British children in seven-year increments starting in 1964 and continuing, so far, until 2019. Richard Linklater likewise conjures an extraordinarily ordinary fictional coming of age in 2014’s “Boyhood,” shooting over 12 years. Fans of either will thoroughly appreciate the “Is it Easy to be Young?” trilogy.

With the first “Is it Easy to be Young?” (1986), documentarian Juris Podnieks cracks into both the universal disquiet of becoming an adult and the precise experience of living in an occupied country finally on the brink of freedom. The film opens with revelatory colorful footage of a stadium rock concert outside Riga. Teens with feathered or spiked hair and collared shirts head-bang in a mosh pit as if exhaling for the first time. An occasional stoic adult stands motionless among the youth, on guard. News clips reveal that some teens got rowdy on the way home and vandalized a train car. Podnieks uses these events as the film’s backdrop. Inside the courtroom, he captures one young man’s collapse when he gets a “three years hard labor” sentence. The film tracks him down later, and several others from the concert, including young men who served in Afghanistan, a few who turn to punk culture, and a young woman, newly a mom. (Male subjects overwhelmingly outnumber female subjects in “Is it Easy” and the “Up” series.)

In unguarded interviews (often shot in black and white), interspersed with scenes from the concert and the sounds of electric guitar riffs, young people confess feeling lost under the weight of change. Speaking of his grandfather’s generation, one veteran says, “They had something to fight for. Today there’s nothing worth living or dying for.” I hung on every word, every frame, wondering where their lives would take them. Podniek’s voice can often be heard and occasionally he can be seen asking questions off camera. In the two follow-up films, a female voice takes its place. That’s because long-time colleague Antra Cilinska made “Is it Easy to be… After 10 Years” in 1997 and “Is it Easy… After 20 Years” in 2007 after his death. Though the tension wanes somewhat with each subsequent film (as it can with aging), taken in sum the series stands rightfully within the classic American “teen movie” pantheon but with much different political stakes.

Much of the shift is implied, not spelled out, though there are resonances with American youth of the same generation (one clever serviceman turns into a London accountant, for example). Even still, Fred Wiseman’s 1968 documentary, “High School,” Keva Rosenfeld’s 1986 documentary “All American High” or Nanette Burstein’s 2008 “American Teen” make interesting counterparts. In all of the above, kids let loose, grow up too fast, and clash over the mess left by the generation before. To answer, then, is it easy to be young? Never and always, especially when captured on film.

The trilogy screens virtually March 3-17.

“Drowning Dry,” Lithuania’s submission to the Academy for Best International Feature, opens in an extreme setting, amidst a professional martial arts match. After, a woman and child appear in the locker room with the fighter, then another woman and child appear. Their relationships remain opaque until everyone sets off in different cars for a weekend together. They are sisters with their husbands and kids. The danger of the competition transfers into the sharp edges of realism. An immobile camera captures an entire room as the sisters move in and out, filling drawers, making beds and sweeping the floor at a lake house.

The set-up, and the title, infuse the film with foreboding. What will happen and when? It’s not quite “There Will Be Blood” but closer to “Force Majeure,” another story about the ripple effect a major event has on family interrelations. The brilliance of this film comes in how the sisters interact — their dark humor persists through the film’s several proposed endings. But in each version, the husbands negotiate their different types of power; the cousins bond while smashing pottery on the floor; the sisters rely on each other to cope with devastating loss. Unexpected and riveting, relatable and otherworldly, this film uses a clever nonlinear story structure to ask us to think, and think again, about the worries and grief we bury in order to make it through the day.

Showing in-person March 1 with a Q&A with director Laurynas Bareiša following the screening.

Easily one of the strangest and most original films I’ve seen in some time, “8 Views of Lake Biwa” borrows structure from Japanese tropes and folk tales to tell a not-always-coherent story about a hidden people living in coastal Europe. (Is it Estonia? We do not know.) Initially the era is unclear. So are the characters’ motivations. Their plain dress hints at something Amish, or cult-like (a certain bowl haircut signs ‘cult’ no matter what part of the world). They whisper blessings to some deity, but also confess evil thoughts. There are no cellphones or computers.

As the chapters unfold, and the relationships become clearer, the film leans more heavily into its Japanese inspiration. That begs the questions: What is the connection between these two places? These two distant groups of people? The American academy would wonder about cultural appropriation, but director Marko Raat says, “The traditional Japanese animistic Shinto belief system, upholding the spirituality of all living things, the soulfulness of the whole world, encompasses exactly what we, here in the West, have lost.” With hints of David Lynch, and a dash of bayou flair as seen in films like “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” “8 Views” boldly rocks boat after boat, searching for its soul. As Estonia’s Academy Award nominee for Best International Feature, that’s risking a lot more than several of this year’s Best Picture nominees.

Showing in-person March 2 with a Q&A with director Marko Raat and actor Simeoni Sundja following the screening.

Also showing:

• See “Lioness” for the outstanding performance by Katariina Unt as a mother struggling with a daughter who frequently goes missing and starts hanging out with a dangerous crowd.
• “Five and a Half Love Stories in an Apartment in Vilnius” brings interconnected stories about infidelity, infertility and chance encounters.
• For the kids, the skateboarding and superheroes in “Boom!” should be a kick.
• “Southern Chronicles” is a Lithuania-set fictionalized coming-of-age story that mixes well with “Is it Easy to be Young?”

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