Seeing Differently: The Film Language of the Latvian Director Laila Pakalnina

Abstract

"The creative work of the Latvian film director, producer, and scriptwriter Laila Pakalniņa (born 1962)...can be organically linked with the phenomenon of Anna Lācis and her wider context.... Anna Lācis led a life that was unconventional for a woman, and her interests, theoretical views, and everything we know about her creative practices place her in the discourse of modernity and the art of modernism, the same discourse in which Laila Pakalniņa has been working since the end of the twentieth century and in which she is still working today.... In this article, I identify the main characteristics of Laila Pakalniņa’s oeuvre in order to demonstrate that she and Anna Lācis can be perceived as female fellow-traveller directors, who are similar both in their aesthetic search and, in a certain way, in their destinies, which to a large extent can be defined by their interest in an artistic language that is alternative to the mainstream and quite often outlandish to a mass audience."