The Nest

A narrow gravelled road cuts like a knife through fields and among trees. Far away you can hear the sound of a car approaching, quickly passing by and eventually disappearing. Suddenly you are in the middle of a field, right at the edge of the forest a woman is sitting down milking a cow. Except from the chirping of birds there is a meditative silence. The next moment we see a man lovingly fondling a hen. A quick, jerky image of a chopping-block before the hen is decapitated. The above scenario confronts the viewer early on in the film and takes place within less than a minute. In many ways these scenes describe the core of The Nest. It deals with modern man and his/her way of dealing not only with nature but also him- or herself, history and the future. The story is simple. A young family, biologists, leave the big city of Riga and moves to a nature reserve. The management of the reserve allows them to stay in a house that the previous owner has not tried to claim since the war. However the previous owner returns. Step by step he realises that the family has managed the home of his childhood in a commendable way and they have also managed to keep the ''soul'' of the property. There is never really any conflict between these two special interests, instead the director Aivars Freimanis has chosen to focus on the relationship between the biologist couple and particularly the nature that surrounds them. This film is a tribute to the nature, the animals and mankind. Nature is depicted on the one hand as idyllic and pure, on the other hand as mystical and scary. Incredibly beautiful surroundings whose tranquillity and calm is striking.The mobile and occasionally unsteady camera work makes Freimani's film resemble a documentary more than fiction. The style is borrowed from a tradition that goes back to the Maysles brothers' ''direct cinema'', in which the authenticity, the degree of honesty, is considered particularly important. The theme, that is, the way of describing nature as an honorable and mystical ideal, can also be found among documentary filmmakers such as Robert Flaherty and in particular Arne Sucksdorff. A certain pantheism is traceable among those filmmakers as well as in Freimani's film. Nature is not only where these people live, it is also something to fight against. Against the unconditional praise of pure archaic values of nature, history and the peasant community, opposites are quickly lined up: nature vs. culture, old vs. young, reality vs. fiction, essence vs. emptiness and above all the nationalistic and small against the large and imperialistic. A contemporary film which discuss the growing importance of the commercial media as well as politics and the risks involved with a huge state with a central bureaucracy. RL

Premiärstatus
Skandinavisk premiär: Orig. titel
Ligzda: Medverkande
Leonids Locenieks, Dace Bonate, Valdis Lurdins: Producent
Rolands Kalnins: Manus
Aivars Freimanis: Foto
Viktors Gribermanis: Talat språk
Latvian