The Riga International Film Festival (17-27 October) begins tomorrow, with the event based in Latvia’s capital promising a feast of films alongside a raft of industry offerings. Audiences will get the opportunity to discover new works from local talents as well as indulge in some of the latest festival hits, whilst industry guests will be afforded a number of events at which they can unearth new leading lights in cinema.

The centrepiece will be the RIGA IFF Feature Film Competition, with ten striking and diverse films from the Baltic Sea region and the Scandinavian countries. The selection will include world premieres of documentaries from the leading lights of Latvian filmmaking. Māra Maskalāns will unveil The End, a nature-based documentary about life and death, while doyenne of Latvian documentary Laila Pakalniņa will show off Termini [+lee también:
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entrevista: Laila Pakalnina
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entrevista: Directors Talks @ European…
entrevista: Saulė Bliuvaitė
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entrevista: Laurynas Bareiša
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Other pictures in competition include the Ukrainian documentary Songs of Slow Burning Earth [+lee también:
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entrevista: Olha Zhurba
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entrevista: Besir Zeciri
entrevista: Directors Talks @ European…
entrevista: Magnus von Horn
ficha de la película]. The festival’s Short Film Competition, meanwhile, will see one film garner the European Film Awards candidacy for nomination for Best European Short.

Out of competition, there’s a surfeit of festival favourites, such as Andrea Arnold’s Bird [+lee también:
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ficha de la película], Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door [+lee también:
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ficha de la película] by Quentin Dupieux, while movies such as Lukas Moodysson’s Together 99 [+lee también:
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ficha de la película] and Rúnar Rúnarsson’s When the Light Breaks [+lee también:
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entrevista: Elín Hall
entrevista: Rúnar Rúnarsson
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The focus on German cinema will include a newly restored version of Wim Wenders’ classic road movie Paris, Texas, while a retrospective will also be afforded to legendary Czech animator and surrealist Jan Švankmajer.

For attending industry delegates, the third edition of the Riga IFF Showcase co-production market will be made up of eight features and eight series from the Baltics and Eastern as well as Central Europe. The line-up will feature the second season of the acclaimed TV show Soviet Jeans [+lee también:
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entrevista: Kārlis Arnolds Avots
ficha de la serie], created by Staņislavs Tokalovs. It will also include the latest work by the aforementioned Laila Pakalniņa, Cat on My Mind, as well as the upcoming feature Times New Roman by Ukrainian director Philip Sotnychenko, whose debut, La Palisiada [+lee también:
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entrevista: Philip Sotnychenko
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Projects included in the line-up will be evaluated by an international jury consisting of Frédéric Lavigne, artistic director of Series Mania; Daria Badior, Kyiv Critics’ Week co-curator and film critic; Marija Razgutė, producer and M-films founder; Geoffrey Macnab, film critic at The Independent and Screen International; and Jānis Kalējs, producer and co-founder of Film Angels Studio. The winning project will receive a cash prize of €5,000. The jury will also select the project to be presented at NEM Zagreb in December.