Live images of non-happenings in various locations in the suburbs of Riga in Latvia (Moskatchka), inhabited primarily by members of the Russian minority. The focused clearness of the sequence of scenes, shot using a static camera in a minimalist film style, grows visually out of the roots of the documentary film from the silent film era, and it permits the nature of life‘s two peripheries (urban and nationality) to penetrate the viewer with the melancholic fullness of invisible events, where out of the images there gradually emerges an impression, which joins together all the substance of the ordinary, living on hand to mouth in the mythical space of one housing estate.
The space between the buildings, an opening for film – consciousness of the documentary as the infinite existence of future images, and, at the same time, the search for a way in which to say something about the world without it becoming an explanation. The emptiness that can become the subject of the documentary’s thinking, sensations that do not run a dividing line between visual and conceptual, sensuality that connects regarding and thinking, the documentary film that by means of recording and description establishes the conditions for meaningful cognisance. The event of the film prompts the ordinary, which the film does not want to manipulate, to speak and lets it occur like a pause in the viewer’s subjective time, like an open vista into the world of the limitless silence of existence on earth. Static images sustain a harmonic relationship between man and space without being able to ignore the extreme culmination of dispossession, which has its own social time, in which the survivors do not dispose of their lives like the free. The film’s tension breaks from the balanced images that while resonating with sound of silence give rise to an oppressive sense of social despair, indifference at first glimpse invisible, poverty enduring unnoticed.
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