Apple in the River

When the termination of Rolands Kalniņš’s Maritime Climates created a production quota problem for Rīgas Kinostudijā (a certain amount of films had to be made each year, now they were one short), an also-halted(!) documentary by Aivars Freimanis was taken from the shelf and turned into a fiction feature.

Bizarrely enough, Freimanis had exactly the opposite problem to Kalniņš: Maritime Climates was deemed too politically cheeky and too aesthetically crazy, with its stylish colour scheme-cum-stylised sets – while the documentary out of which Apple in the River grew was judged too realistic, candid, unadorned. Freimanis ‘solved’ this problem by inserting a bitterly tender yet light-hearted and bright-eyed teenage romance into this setting: the story of lovely Anita, who finds kind Janis in Rīga, only to lose him again in Rīga – leading to a search that becomes an exploration of the city, in particular the sections close to the Daugava.

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