Beta Film has picked up international distribution rights to Latvia’s “Soviet Jeans.” Presented at Berlinale Series Market Selects, the show will premiere at Series Mania in March.
Set in Riga in the late 1970s and based on multiple true stories, it zooms in onto young rock fan Renars (Karlis Arnolds Avots), sent to a mental asylum for political reasons. Undeterred, he starts illegal production of counterfeit U.S. jeans with his inmates, flooding the black market.
“We wanted to make it international,” said Teodora Markova who showruns alongside Stanislavs Tokalovs. They wrote the script with Waldemar Kalinowski.
“We also decided to go for a completely different tone when depicting this period, which so often is shown in this harsh, gloomy way. People used to joke during communism too: Humor was their main survival mechanism. They still lived and loved and laughed. Most of them had to learn how to trick the system,...
Set in Riga in the late 1970s and based on multiple true stories, it zooms in onto young rock fan Renars (Karlis Arnolds Avots), sent to a mental asylum for political reasons. Undeterred, he starts illegal production of counterfeit U.S. jeans with his inmates, flooding the black market.
“We wanted to make it international,” said Teodora Markova who showruns alongside Stanislavs Tokalovs. They wrote the script with Waldemar Kalinowski.
“We also decided to go for a completely different tone when depicting this period, which so often is shown in this harsh, gloomy way. People used to joke during communism too: Humor was their main survival mechanism. They still lived and loved and laughed. Most of them had to learn how to trick the system,...
- 2/17/2024
- by Marta Balaga
- Variety Film + TV
Polish director Patryk Vega’s usually slick technique fails him utterly here in this lurid story about a cop investigating a girl’s kidnapping by the Russian mafia
Patryk Vega is the Polish writer-director whose hardboiled thrillers have found commercial favour both at home and with diaspora audiences: 2018’s The Plagues of Breslau was the kind of full-throttle, unapologetically 18-rated entertainment western producers have largely backed away from. Regrettably, his latest is both globetrotting and dashed-off, and so remorseless that it becomes actively punishing. Violence is hardwired into Vega’s film-making: his unhinged protagonists can’t walk into a room without it seeming like a declaration of war. You gulp, then, when an ominous (and suspiciously unattributed) epigram – “What sort of species are we, if we cannot protect our children?” – makes clear this director has turned his brawn to addressing trafficking. What follows has two modes: lurid and sentimental. Either way,...
Patryk Vega is the Polish writer-director whose hardboiled thrillers have found commercial favour both at home and with diaspora audiences: 2018’s The Plagues of Breslau was the kind of full-throttle, unapologetically 18-rated entertainment western producers have largely backed away from. Regrettably, his latest is both globetrotting and dashed-off, and so remorseless that it becomes actively punishing. Violence is hardwired into Vega’s film-making: his unhinged protagonists can’t walk into a room without it seeming like a declaration of war. You gulp, then, when an ominous (and suspiciously unattributed) epigram – “What sort of species are we, if we cannot protect our children?” – makes clear this director has turned his brawn to addressing trafficking. What follows has two modes: lurid and sentimental. Either way,...
- 9/15/2021
- by Mike McCahill
- The Guardian - Film News
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