RIGA PASAULES FILM FESTIVAL FOCUSES ON HEALING

Riga Pasaules Film Festival 2022 celebrates the healing power of documentary cinema. We will share with you stories about individual and collective healing from experiences that break connections between us and the Other. The festival will take place from April 7 to 10 at the cinema Kino Bize.

We present 23 films that offer insight into the lives of those we tend to categorize as needing to be cured, while showing that it is our definitions and institutional practices that suffer and need change. Films that explore alternative therapeutic practices invented by those that we qualify as “patients”, such as the community of voice hearers; facilities focusing on the safety of drug consumers; collaborative art practices taking place in psychiatric institutions. We will also delve into practices parallel to the state judicial system, such as stirring accounts of death penalty mediation. The other films will let us explore how we reconfigure our identities through the experience of illness, death, war and migration. And, most of all, there are tender and heart-warming stories where friendship and love is a way through challenges.

We would like to share with you what we discovered through the films we selected for this year’s edition of the festival, - that healing means embracing life as it unfolds, with its challenges and ruptures; and that the camera is a valuable companion in this process.

The visual identity by an artist Evridiki Papaiakovou, festival trailer by Daniel Allen. The festival is organized by cinema Kino Bize, supported by State Culture Capital Foundation.

Published: 29.03.2022.