31/01/2025 - Seven years later, Latvian documentary filmmaker Ivars Seleckis shoots the sequel to To Be Continued and gives us a reflection of contemporary Latvia through the lives of a group of teenagers

In 2015, the legendary Ivars Seleckis (who celebrated his 90th birthday last year) directed the observational documentary To Be Continued [+see also:
trailer
film profile], about five first grade children starting school in various regions of Latvia. Seven years later, Seleckis and his crew went back to these children, now 14 years old, to shoot the sequel. To Be Continued. Teenhood is also signed by new generation editor and director Armands Začs (he’s 34 years old). Ivars Seleckis is one of the most important contemporary European documentary filmmakers, one of the founders of the legendary Riga Film School, and he has created with others the famous Latvian style of “poetic documentary cinema”. To Be Continued. Teenhood is his 35th film. It was presented as an international premiere at IDFA in Amsterdam and in competition at the Trieste Film Festival, and will screen at Tallinn’s DocPoint in February.

The original idea of the 2015 documentary was developed together with Daci Dzenovska, a social anthropologist at Oxford University, and conceived as a long-term documentary observation of the generation of the centenary of Latvia’s independence, aiming to meet the film’s protagonists at every decade. While in the first film, we met the characters in Riga, Kusa, Vecpiebalga and Stoļerovo, now some of them live and study elsewhere. Their names are Kārlis, Zane, Anete, Gļebs and Anastasija, and we are introduced to them as children at the beginning of To Be Continued. Teenhood, with quick sequences taken from the first documentary. Seven years later, they are teenagers: the pandemic, politics, the war have entered their lives and despite the uncertain scenario (common to their peers all across Europe), they are at the age where they must decide on their future choices. The brief news from the Ukrainian war front, which occasionally are heard on the radio in the background, are signs of the times. In the episode in which Kārlis and his grandfather sit side by side after having cut the grass, the old man says that the most important thing is freedom and having one’s own country. With their passions and aspirations, vigorously expressed during learning at school, social events, hormone-induced emotional formation – Zane and basketball, Anstasija and her horses, Anete’s independent lifestyle, Kārlis who has experienced his first serious relationship with a girl and the pain of the breakup – these children give us a portrait of contemporary Latvia in all its complexity and a cross-section of its social strata. They live in different social environments, they have different salaries, families, schools, clubs and relationships, in different regions of the country, superbly shot by Valdis Celmiņš.

The film also highlights the coexistence of two worlds: the Latvian kids and those who speak Russian (25% of the country). The latter are educated and trained in martial arts, with parents who plan their days hour by hour and foresee a radiant future for them, at the centre of the universe. Meanwhile, the Latvians are represented as more melancholic, some while working in the fields, sawing wood with their parents, smoothing out the horses’ hooves and not excelling in their studies. Začs’s editing is fast paced, leaving out the superfluous. This isn’t about a single school class, as in the German project The Children of Golzow (1961-2007), which producer Gints Grübe cites as one of his main sources of inspiration: the fact that the children are scattered in remote areas has certainly complicated the “method of prolonged observation”. Whoever interacts with the characters – family members, friends, teachers, the social environment – remains in the background, even if they support them in the difficult realisation of their own uniqueness and in their attempt to live a meaningful life.

To Be Continued. Teenhood was produced by Mistrus Media, which also handles the film’s international sales.

(Translated from Italian)