10 great Baltic films

This year’s Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles sparked celebrations among Latvia’s film industry, as the small Baltic nation came away with its first Oscar, for Flow by Gints Zilbalodis, which won in the Best Animated Feature category. 

The film’s deeply humane vision of a natural world beset by the peril of a great flood is portrayed through the perspective of a dark grey cat who, along with a host of other creatures, journeys through the post-apocalyptic natural environment in search of somewhere liveable. 

It struck a chord with global audiences trying to come to terms with the anxieties and dangers of our unstable era, as – with its precise eye for the movements and behaviours of animals – it suggests sensitive attention lies at the heart of future healing.

In honouring the talent of Zilbalodis, Flow’s Oscar win was a sign Latvian cinema has truly found its feet since the fall of the Soviet Union and restoration of independence in 1991 (at which time, Latvia did not have its own animation school). Latvia’s Baltic neighbours, Estonia and Lithuania, have also made swift strides in advancing their national film industries in the post-independence years. A number of talented filmmakers continued to hone their craft, and others emerged as part of a new generation intent on processing the collective pains of the past and defining a future on their own terms. 

Here, we spotlight 10 more films by some of the most distinctive voices of contemporary Baltic cinema across animation, live-action fiction and documentary.

Director: Priit Pärn

In dirty browns, scratchy black and gloomy blues, renowned Estonian animator Priit Pärn depicts an oppressive urban environment of corruption and bureaucratic absurdity in Breakfast on the Grass – a dark-humoured, surreal satire of daily life under communism. We follow four individuals on their quests to obtain some good or service, beginning with Anna, who struggles to get her hands on an apple, and playboy wannabe Georg, who lacks a suit. 

An artist, strongarmed by state officials, and tailed by crows, pops up in all of the strands, which come together as the four citizens pose in a park to recreate Manet’s eponymous painting, in a communal grasp at beauty which, we see, is not without peril. As an art academy professor, Pärn has mentored many among the region’s new generation of animators, while continuing to produce his own work, often in collaboration with his wife Olga.

Director: Audrius Stonys

“If you already know something, why make a film about it?” Lithuanian director Audrius Stonys, a key figure in the Baltic region’s celebrated tradition of poetic documentary, once said. From the 1960s onward, Baltic documentarians opposed to Soviet realist diktats had sought to return a sense of spiritual mystery and wonder to the screen. Such filmmakers regarded cinema as the search for an essence of truth free of the cynical lies of propaganda that rigidly circumscribed public life and freedom. 

In his black-and-white short Antigravitation (the short film format was common as a solution to funding limitations in the post-independence 90s), a woman climbs a vertiginously steep ladder onto the rooftop of a church in a village coated white with snow. Stonys frequently makes work concerned with elevation and the transcendence of earthly concerns – or as he puts it, citizens who have a “vertical dimension” and create their own inner worlds.

Director: Laila Pakalnina

Latvian filmmaker Laila Pakalnina is best-known for her poetic, playful and satirical documentaries, which often sideline humans to focus on other routines and rhythms of the world’s ecosystems. Dream Land takes us into a garbage dump teeming with life, where a great deal of drama unfolds that is not otherwise apparent to the casual human eye, as a profusion of insects, birds and other creatures take care of the business of survival.

Pakalnina’s observational approach entrusts space for the element of surprise to unfold in the unstaged, and invites us to alter our perspective to the minutiae at ground level. Any assumptions we may have of the trash site as a ghastly, nihilistic zone of the discarded and the degenerating is challenged by delight in the natural universe’s everyday comedy, as we take the point-of-view of animals who relate to this bustling environment as a home and source of life.

Director: Veiko Õunpuu

If the new God is capitalism, then middle management is the realm of saints – at least according to the darkly absurdist world of Estonian director Veiko Õunpuu’s The Temptation of St. Tony, loosely inspired by a medieval painting by Hieronymous Bosch. As Tony (Taavi Eelmaa) grapples with his father’s death and an order to lay off a lot of workers, his existential crisis turns hallucinatory. Tempted to be moral but unsure what that even entails, his journey takes him through a confounding winter landscape and into the dissolute recesses of a cabaret, The Golden Age. 

The jarring transition to free-market consumerism that came with the modern Estonian nation’s break from the USSR underpins the identity anxiety of this surreal fever dream, the director’s second feature following his Venice-awarded debut Autumn Ball (2007). Õunpuu, also a painter, became known for the visual flair and unorthodox experimentation of his arthouse features.

Director: Zaza Urushadze

Estonia’s first film short-listed for an Academy Award was Tangerines, a humanist wartime drama exploring ideas of homeland and ethnic division, integrity and intractability, that was a co-production with Georgia. Written and directed by Zaza Urushadze, it is set in 1992 in a village of ethnic Estonians in Abkhazia, where the conflict between the newly independent Georgia and Russia-backed separatists has caused nearly all the residents to flee. 

Only Ivo (Lembit Ulfsak) and Margus (Elmo Nuganen) remain, waiting to harvest their tangerine crop. When the fighting comes to their doorstep, Ivo takes in two of the wounded from opposing sides, Chechen mercenary Ahmed (Giorgi Nakashidze) and Georgian volunteer Nika (Mikheil Meskhi). Promising not to harm each other under Ivo’s roof while they coalesce, the two adversaries slowly come to respect one another – but more soldiers will come, as will more dilemmas, according to the brutal mechanisms of senseless war.

Director: Signe Baumane

Signe Baumane, a Latvian, New York-based animator, delved into several generations of her family’s past and their mental health struggles to make her feature debut Rocks in My Pockets. The candidly honest history, which Baumane voiced herself, blends hand-drawn work and papier-mâché stop motion, and is buoyed by acerbic humour and playful surrealism. 

Baumane’s grandmother, Anna, married a much older entrepreneur in the 1920s, who took her to live in isolation near a forest, where she raised eight children during the hardships of World War II and invasions by both the Soviets and the Nazis. Depression and suicide continued to be stigmatised, taboo topics in society, and despite Baumane’s questions to her father, her grandmother’s death was always shrouded in mystery. Faced with her own psychological difficulties, like a number of her cousins, Baumane pushed against the family’s code of silence and shame, to confront the demons of these women.

Director: Liis Nimik

A small child sits at the kitchen table with a picture-book, as she is gently schooled by a parent on how to differentiate between the living and the inanimate, in well-established editor Liis Nimik’s directorial debut, the poetic documentary Sundial. It’s one of many scenes of otherworldly charm and wonder in a film that is acutely aware of our existential interconnectedness to the natural universe, and concerned not with surface spectacle but rather some deeper essence at the heart of all things. 

Nimik captures rural Estonia in a series of arresting images and moments beautifully shot on 16mm over seven years. Unhurried and attentive to the big questions and engrossing mysteries that emanate from the smallest of details, she draws us away from the information barrage of modern technology to a rural Estonia of crackling fires and misty fields, where the recurring cycle of the seasons still determines life’s rhythms.

Director: Anna Hints

The smoke sauna of southern Estonia is on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list – and just what makes it such a special, even sacred, part of daily life there is the subject of Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, an intimate, viscerally immersive documentary by Anna Hints, that won her a directing award at Sundance. 

The sauna thaws northern European emotional reserve, becoming a place of healing where women confide in one another with raw honesty about even the hardest of experiences. Amid traditional folk sauna chants, the women cathartically sweat out the pain and fear of identities forged amid the generational trauma of a patriarchal society in which political and economic hardship was often channelled into men’s aggression. The steamy, wood-panelled cabin is shot like a chiaroscuro painting of shadows and golden light, as the shame, expectation and powerlessness so often inextricable from women’s bodies beyond these doors is heard.

Director: Laurynas Bareisa

Laurynas Bareisa won a best directing award at the Locarno Film Festival for his haunting and unsettling second drama Drowning Dry, cementing his reputation as one of Lithuania’s most exciting new voices, after his Venice-awarded debut Pilgrims (2021), which was also about an obsessive struggle to make sense of a life-derailing event. 

Drowning Dry has a fragmented structure that echoes the disorienting ruptures of traumatic memory. The risk-taking proclivities of mixed martial arts fighter Lukas (Paulius Markevicius), which cause tension in his marriage to Ernesta (Gelmine Glemzaite), come to a head on a trip to the countryside to celebrate the birthday of her sister’s husband. As we veer back and forth in time between the lead-up and aftermath of a calamity, easy sensationalism is resisted, as puzzle shards of information are teased out about how a family’s sunny getaway went so wrong, and how they are able to go on.  



Director: Saule Bliuvaite

In a Lithuanian industrial town, teenagers pin their hopes on an unscrupulous local modelling school, in Saule Bliuvaite’s feature debut Toxic, which won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival. Impressively lensed by Vytautas Katkus with an eye for the surreal moments of poetry to be glimpsed within grinding everyday reality, this dark-humoured coming-of-ager with an empathetic heart follows awkward town newcomer Marya (Vesta Matulyte) as recruiters spot potential in her. 

In this economically deprived spot in thrall to consumerism, young women’s bodies are regarded as either a curse or a currency, and transactional relationships are normalised. Marya weighs up whether the upcoming casting contest may offer a ticket to escape from her unstable home life and uncertain career options, and she throws herself with indomitable stoicism into preparations. This is an acerbic takedown of unhealthy beauty standards, and a European Union in which not all are considered born equal.