Juris Vaivods

Raimonds Pauls is almost 85 years old, rehearses almost every day and performs at least once a week. What drives him? Not only he is the most popular composer in Latvia: his songs are sung all over the world. "Dāvāja Māriņa" is so popular in Japan that Paul received the Japanese Order of the Rising Sun. In concerts, he collaborates with world stars of Latvian origin - soprano Elīna Garanča, organist Iveta Apkalna, conductor Mariss Jansons. The Latvian Television film crew follows him during the pandemic, realizing that the restrictions and threats of Covid-19 hardly stop the Maestro in the course of his eternal engine. How does he cope with the challenges that time imposes on a person's physical form and the loneliness when most friends have passed away? What is the source of his inexhaustible lifestyle and creative spirit?

At the end of the Second World War, when the German army retreated from Latvia, it also took along 700 boxes of materials from Latvian museums. If not for a young woman named Mērija Grīnberga, the exhibition halls of many museums in Latvia would be empty today. Grīnberga was the only volunteer who in 1944 went along with the train carrying the treasures of Latvian art in order to return with them back to Riga. The German occupying forces tried to take them away; the Soviet occupation forces brought them back; Mērija completed her duty. As gratitude for her journey, Mērija was sacked from her job at the museum and incessantly viewed with suspicion.

Raimonds Pauls is almost 85 years old, rehearses almost every day and performs at least once a week. What drives him? Not only he is the most popular composer in Latvia: his songs are sung all over the world. "Dāvāja Māriņa" is so popular in Japan that Paul received the Japanese Order of the Rising Sun. In concerts, he collaborates with world stars of Latvian origin - soprano Elīna Garanča, organist Iveta Apkalna, conductor Mariss Jansons. The Latvian Television film crew follows him during the pandemic, realizing that the restrictions and threats of Covid-19 hardly stop the Maestro in the course of his eternal engine. How does he cope with the challenges that time imposes on a person's physical form and the loneliness when most friends have passed away? What is the source of his inexhaustible lifestyle and creative spirit?

Ivanovs! Dailes Theatre

Piirissaar is a tiny Estonian island in Lake Peipus, on the very border of Russia. The Russian Old Believers who inhabited the island appeared here 300 years ago, during the Great Northern War, fleeing from the religious reforms in the Orthodox Church and to avoid being mobilized in the Russian army. As the waves have washed the island smaller and smaller, the community here has also fused over time, inevitably reaching the brink of extinction. However, the local culture and sense of life that developed in isolation from the rest of the “Russian world” has not yet completely disappeared from Piiriissaar.