Marijas klusums

1937. The passengers on the train are preparing for the border crossing, actress Maria Leiko among them. She has been summoned to the USSR by high-ranking secret police officer Jēkabs Peterss in order to bid farewell to her daughter in the morgue – and to learn that she died in childbirth. The grandchild is healthy; Maria wants to take care of her and stays in Moscow, where she works with Asja Lācis at the Latvian Skatuve Theatre. But in reality, she’s playing another role entirely, unwittingly: that of an innocent victim ensnared by Stalinist terror. Dāvis Sīmanis is interested in the radical ideologies of the 20th century in Eastern Europe. With self-assurance, he sketches out this moment of free-floating accord with Soviet power and crafts an instructive narrative about the logic of human violence. Whether an ardent Bolshevik or an apolitical artist, everyone imagines themselves to be untouchable. Blind to the fact that bread is growing scarce on the streets and violence is omnipresent, they themselves create the monster that consumes them. The Latvian Operation is a history lesson that doubles as an allegory or even a prologue to Russia’s “operations” of today. (Berlinale)