Something to Do with the Wall

In 1986, Ross McElwee and Marilyn Levine were making a film about the 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall, when the imposing structure was still very much intact as the world’s most visible symbol of hardline Communism and Cold War lore. They thought they were making a documentary on the community of tourists, soldiers, and West Berliners who lived in the seemingly eternal presence of the graffiti emblazoned eyesore.

But in 1989, as the original film neared completion, the Wall came down, and McElwee and Levine returned to Berlin, this time to capture the radically different atmosphere of the reunified city.

Our special guest for the 11th Riga Pasaules Film Festival will be Ross McElwee, an internationally renowned American documentary filmmaker and Professor of the Practice of Filmmaking at Harvard University. We will have 4 film retrospective with the filmmaker present for Q&As led by Latvian filmmakers.

McElwee learnt documentary cinema at the beginning of the cinéma vérité epoch. His films tackle universal topics such as parenthood, family bonds and generational conflicts, existential questions about life and death, as well as love of moving image - a remedy to loss and death. In the background he tells stories of the American South haunted by the reminiscences of the civil war, Southern pride and conservatism.