Festival begins with Agnès Varda and Becoming Roosi by Margit Lillak

The annual documentary Riga Pasaules Film Festival will take place from May 6 to 10 with a program of feature-length and short films, a retrospective of work by Agnès Varda, as well as a series of industry events. The festival will open on May 6 with Varda’s film Daguerréotypes (1975).

The programme is curated around films that approach filmmaking through drift, where the filmmaker is not guided by a clear destination but by the emotional and sensorial aspects of the environment. We draw inspiration from Guy Debord’s dérive as a notion that involves letting go with trust in the process and its potential outcomes. Filmmakers who are present in the process and set the conditions for situations to happen, making the audience feel as if the film made itself. We are interested in protagonists who are captured in the moment and whose spontaneous responses to their circumstances offer insights as to who they are.

Becoming Roosi by Margit Lillak will open the festival’s main program on May 6 at 20:30. The director has followed a girl named Roosi for ten years, from the age of eight until she reached adulthood. Roosi, who impresses with her openness and honesty, grew up in an eco-community as the daughter of an activist. She is torn between becoming an activist or finding her own path in life, embracing creativity and teenage life. The film reveals an archetypal conflict in the mother-daughter relationship, told through video recordings collected over a decade and saturated with humor, irony, and inevitable clashes.

As part of the program, we will screen four feature-length documentaries by French director Agnès Varda – Daguerréotypes, Mur Murs, The Gleaners and I, Varda by Agnes. This retrospective is a tribute to one of the most significant figures in cinema history, whose works and approach resonate with this year’s theme of wander.

Through observation and the capture of fleeting moments, Varda has managed to create heartfelt and authentic documentary portraits. Her work is characterized by an ability to capture poetic nuances in everyday life and to find the humane in the seemingly mundane. Her films also possess a fragmentary and free form, achieving artistic excellence and intimacy through the bits of footage, with a large portion of the discoveries – images and dialogue that form the narrative – emerging during the film’s editing process.

The festival’s five-day program includes 24 films, which will be screened with subtitles in Latvian and English. On May 7 and 8, the film industry section will feature guest lectures, discussions, and workshops for emerging and established film directors and producers to explore techniques for finding an audience for their stories. RPFF is organised by Kino Bize in collaboration with the Latvian Association of Anthropologists. Supported by the Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia, National Film Centre and the Creative Europe MEDIA Office in Latvia.

Book a ticket online or at the cinema Kino Bize.

Published: 28.04.2026.