🎥 As part of the public program of the exhibition Unframed: Leis, Tabaka, Rožanskaitė, Zuzeum invites you to a lecture by Dārta Ceriņa, Director and Actress: The Concept of Creative Partnerships Between Women in Latvian Cinema.
📅 Wednesday, 9 April 2025, 6:00 PM
🎟️ Free admission with prior registration
🗣️ The lecture will take place in Latvian
In recent decades, European, North American, and other regional cinemas have witnessed a notable trend: the consistent collaboration between female directors and actresses. Female directors have increasingly chosen to work with scripts focused on female characters or adapted from material written by female writers and screenwriters. Prominent examples include Claire Denis and Juliette Binoche in France, Sofia Coppola and Kirsten Dunst in the United States, and Joanna Hogg and Tilda Swinton in the United Kingdom, among many others. In various national film industries, the idea of female creative partnerships and the narratives shaped through them has become a recognized tradition, extending beyond the realm of auteur cinema.
What is the evolution of women’s creative film partnerships in Latvia? Historically, collaborations between female directors and actresses in Latvian cinema have been rare. Several factors contribute to this, including the traditionally male-dominated nature of the directing profession, the structure of film production, and barriers related to education, accessibility, and other social aspects. During the Soviet occupation, women made up only 14.73% of all directors in Riga Film Studio’s narrative filmmaking, as noted by researcher Vita Zelče. Instead, they were primarily employed as film editors, costume designers, makeup artists, set designers, sound designers, editors, and production managers. However, a few notable collaborations stand out from this period, particularly in the films directed by Ada Neretniece and Dzidra Ritenberga.
In the 21st century, with the shift in socio-economic structures, the rise of neoliberalism, and the increasing prominence of auteur cinema theory, the past two decades have brought several significant creative partnerships between women in Latvian cinema. These collaborations extend beyond a single project, encompassing multiple films. Notable examples include the partnerships between Una Celma and Rēzija Kalniņa, Laila Pakalniņa and Guna Zariņa, Marta Elīna Martinsone and Marija Linarte, as well as Liene Linde and Inga Tropa. The once-prevalent idea that filmmaking is too demanding for women has been disproven
This lecture will explore different models of on-screen partnerships between female directors and actresses and examine why such collaborations were less common in 20th-century Latvian narrative cinema. Additionally, it will discuss historical and contemporary examples in Latvian cinema and the thematic and analytical perspectives they reveal – raising the question: does female collaboration in film always align with feminist discourse?
About the lecturer
Dārta Ceriņa is a film critic and researcher, curator of the Riga International Film Festival (RIGA IFF), and research assistant at the Institute of Arts and Cultural Studies, Latvian Academy of Culture.
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