FOREIGNERS IN THEIR OWN HOMES: ON LATVIAN DOCUMENTARY “DOUBLE ALIENS”

NOVEMBER 2, 2015

by Richard Martyn-Hemphill, RIGA 

This year’s Riga International Film Festival got underway at Splendid Palace cinema last Friday with a showing of Double Aliens, a Latvian-Georgian documentary film shot in Samtskhe-Javakheti, an arid and mountainous region in southern Georgia.

The film is the latest offering from the Latvian director and screenwriter Uģis Olte, meditative video reportage of his travels in the Caucasus with Daro Sulakaurire, a young Georgian photographer.

Filming a photographer at work proves an effective way to reveal a region that remains isolated and little-known. Her presence puts people at ease; she has a soulful, mournful look about her, which locals respond well to, and her high-tech camera equipment is a reminder, amid horse-drawn carts and hand-held ploughs, that this is being filmed, after all, in the present day.

Mike Collier

A BRITISH WRITER IN LATVIA: AN INTERVIEW WITH MIKE COLLIER

Mike Collier is a British writer and journalist who has lived in Latvia since 2008. He currently edits the English-language version of LSM, Latvia’s public broadcasting service, and is also the author of two works of fiction, The Fourth Largest in Latvia and the recently issued Baltic Byline (you can read a short extract on Deep Baltic). Baltic Byline is a sharp, witty collection of stories following seedy, cynical foreign correspondent Beacon in a country very like Latvia, as he deals with the vicissitudes of the profession in a small country; he manages a presidential campaign as a way of getting revenge on a politician who has crossed him, covers a gay pride parade and its fervent opponents and inadvertently gets interrogated by the secret service, all the while focusing on looking after his cat, keeping up with rent payments and dealing with the vanity and ignorance of the Brussels journalists flown in for the top stories. Deep Baltic editor Will Mawhood caught up with Mike on a wintry March day in a central Riga park to discuss journalism, Latvia and writing.

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Let’s talk a bit about Baltic Byline. First of all, I was interested that you go into Latvian society by way of a journalist who comes into contact with almost everyone who is prominent in society. I think this reveals something both about Latvian society and also about journalism.

I’m interested that you say you thought it shows something in Latvian society, because I don’t really think that this one does very much. Certainly compared to the first book [The Fourth Largest in Latvia] where the subject was Latvia and Latvian society in a way. This one is a bit more isolated in that the subject is journalism and journalists, although the background is Latvia. In the first draft of the book I didn’t even specify the country – even though it was Latvia, and bits of Estonia and other countries I work in as well – but working around that sounded so phoney, referring to “the country” or “the state” or whatever, so I changed it back. But the intention wasn’t to have Latvia in the foreground; it was to have the journalists in the foreground. To an extent, that is just the majority of my experience since I’ve been here, but along the way I hopefully have accumulated stories and seen things. It is autobiographical, but I hope it’s not purely autobiographical – a lot of the things I’ve stolen from other people or they’re things that have been whispered around the journalistic community.