07/02/2025 - The seasoned filmmaker’s documentary, playing in the Forum sidebar, delves into the unseen impact of war on daily life in Lviv, Ukraine

In roughly a week’s time, the 75th edition of the Berlinale (13-23 February) will kick off. As usual, a Latvian contingent of professionals and decision makers will visit the German capital to attend the festival and the accompanying European Film Market, running this year from 13-19 February.

In particular, the gathering will shine a spotlight on Latvian cinema with one title screened in one of the sidebars and European Shooting Star Kārlis Arnolds Avots in attendance. Avots is carving out a career through distinctive and demanding roles. He starred in Viesturs Kairišs’s coming-of-age drama January [+see also:
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film profile], Latvia’s official submission for the Academy Awards, which earned him the Best Actor Award at the 2022 Rome Film Fest. His international recognition continued to grow when he won the top acting prize at Series Mania in Lille for his performance in the 2024 series Soviet Jeans [+see also:
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interview: Kārlis Arnolds Avots
series profile]. The jury underlined how “he is equally skilled in comedy and tragedy, bringing humour to the role while also conveying deep suffering”, defining him as “both energetic and sensitive”.

This year’s edition of the Shooting Stars programme (see the news) is particularly special, as actors from all three Baltic countries have been selected – Lithuania is represented by Šarūnas Zenkevičius, whilst Estonia’s Maarja Johanna Mägi, familiar to Latvian audiences from the Latvian-Estonian co-production Melchior the Apothecary, also joins the line-up.

Avots is also involved in Kairišs’s latest project, Ulya, mentioning in a recent interview with Baltic Film that only five days of filming remained, scheduled for the spring. He also revealed that Soviet Jeans would have a second season, co-produced with Germany, although production will not begin until next year at the earliest. Additionally, he hinted at the possibility of working on an Estonian film, although this was still uncertain.

Looking ahead, Avots shared that he would be collaborating with renowned Polish theatre director Łukasz Twarkowski on a production set to premiere at the Ruhrtriennale. The play will apparently explore the life of Alan Turing, considered to be the father of artificial intelligence.

Next, the Latvian film taking part in this year’s Berlinale is Vitaly Mansky’s Time to the Target [+see also:
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film profile], set to be showcased in the Forum strand (see the news). The three-hour documentary delves into the unseen impact of war on daily life in Mansky’s hometown of Lviv, Western Ukraine. The helmer never set out to make this film – it took shape on its own. While gathering material for Eastern Front [+see also:
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interview: Vitaly Mansky, Yevhen Titar…
film profile] and Iron, Mansky often stopped in Lviv, struggling to grasp how his hometown had changed. Outwardly, everything seemed the same – the streets, the buildings and the people – but life had shifted fundamentally. “War has become normal,” he observes. “As cynical as it sounds, this is their reality now.”

The film centres on the military orchestra of the Hetman Petro Sahaidachnyi National Ground Forces Academy. Each day, as Mansky watched the city, he saw funerals for young men. The mourners changed, but the musicians remained constant. He wondered how they endured such strain. Over time, he got to know them, realising their service provided a lens into this transformed existence – one where peace lasted only as long as a missile remained in the air.

Yet, the film isn’t solely about loss. It captures daily life – cafés, theatres and markets – and moments of levity amid war. At a shooting range, people once aimed at random targets; now, they fire at a portrait of Putin.

Mansky lensed the pic with DoPs Roman Petrusyak and Aleksey Leskov. Commenting on the three-hour running time of his latest effort, he adds: “It’s three hours long because time itself is the dramaturgy of this film, and sadly, this is the shortest possible running time it could have had. It is a deliberate choice, one that may limit the film’s future screenings, as not every festival will dare to programme such a lengthy work. But for me, what this documentary conveys is far more important than what we might lose because of its length.”

The feature was produced by Vertov (Latvia), and co-produced by Hypermarket Film (Czech Republic), Jan Barta (Czech Republic), Braha Production Company (Ukraine) and Czech Television, with backing from the Czech Audiovisual Fund, the National Film Centre of Latvia, UPP Prague and the Ukrainian State Film Agency.