Everyone loves the surprise Latvian best animated feature Oscar winner Flow. The dialogue-free movie about a solitary cat’s emotional journey has become a calling card for the country and its director and producer Gints Zilbalodis. But Matīss Kaža, his writing and production partner on Flow, is not resting on such laurels.
The 29-year-old recently traveled to the 78th edition of the Locarno Film Festival for a quick visit to its Locarno Pro industry strand to present what his Dream Well Studio and his Trickster Pictures have coming up, including the new feature animation from Zilbalodis, called Limbo, as well I Love You, Lex Fridman!, which he is directing himself together with actress and co-director Iveta Pole.
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After that, THR caught up with Kaža to hear about some of the many projects he is currently juggling, the state of the Latvian film industry, and the soft power of Flow.
Tell me a bit about your two companies and how busy they are right now.
I work at two different studios, which are in the same building. We have Dream Well Studio, which is the animation studio, which is, of course, known for Flow. It really only does Gints Zilbalodis films after it was founded basically for the production of Flow.
The other studio, called Trickster Pictures, is where I do all the live-action and documentary stuff. I’m working on a lot of projects. That’s the thing about me and where Gints and I differ. He is a deep focus person who likes to concentrate on one singular project, and I need 15 different projects at the same time in order to feel like I’m doing something worthwhile. I direct movies. I produce movies. I direct theater. I teach at the Latvian Academy of Culture. I write some of the films I work on. Sometimes I write plays. So I do a lot of stuff at the same time, and that’s the way my brain works.
Locarno Pro featured you and others at a special “Latvian Film Previews” section. What projects did you present or talk about there?
I was there with two projects. On one, we’re still in pre-production, which is Limbo, the next animated film by Gints Zilbalodis that will be released in 2028. So there’s still three years of production post for the film ahead of us. Just like with Gints’ previous projects, this is also a film where the different stages of production are kind of happening at the same time. As Gints is doing the animatic, which is what he’s working on right now, he’s also writing the script, and he’s also composing hours and hours of music to test on the animatic. So everything is kind of simultaneous. All these different elements, which traditionally come in various stages, are being worked on at the same time. We’re very excited about it.
What we can share at this point is that it’s going to be the first time when Gints is working with dialogue. So there are going to be some actors involved in the project. Gints is always taking on new challenges for himself. And there will be certain elements, just like with Flow, where the production process and the state of mind of the director kind of resemble the plot line and the emotional through line of the film.
What’s important for us working on this project is for it to be another independent European animation.
We are working together with Sacrebleu Productions, our French partners from Flow, right now. But the main thing is that we want for Gints to be able to keep his very unique process, and for us as the main producer to keep the rights to the final cut. Because we have these conditions met, Gints can be comfortable working on the project, and he really needs to feel safe about what he’s doing. It has to be an experience where he has full control. Even I, as the producer, have the right to comment and to give notes, but when we disagree, I always say to Gints: “If you want to do it this way, you know best.”
That all sounds really exciting! Can you share anything more about the plot of Limbo?
Not at this stage. But what we can talk about is the way it’s going to be made. It’s still going to be mostly in Blender, just like Flow, so open-source software. Right now, we have a very small team working on the film, maybe three or four people are in the office from day to day, and that’s the Latvian team that’s working on it. We have received the base funding in Latvia from the National Film Center. They gave the film the highest grant they’ve ever handed out, a bit more than 2 million euros ($2.3 million), including the development money, which is a lot for any film center in Europe, but especially for a small country like Latvia. So there’s a lot of trust in the project.
What we’ve seen with Flow is that it’s become, let’s say, an element of cultural diplomacy. Latvia is now recognized because of Flow, and we hope to continue this with Limbo and other projects coming from the studio. It’s really to get more attention, not just for Latvia and our companies, but for Latvian animation and cinema in general. I think where our country is unique is that we’re super, super small, and yet we have these animation auteurs like Gints Zilbalodis and Signe Baumane, who did My Love Affair with Marriage, and is now working on her new project, and Ilze Burkovska-Jacobsen who did My Favorite War and has a presentation of her upcoming work here in Locarno. And these are all auteurs who are working in the feature-length animation format, which is a very expensive and specific format. And it’s very rare that there are so many high-quality animated films coming from a very small country. So that’s something that we really can capitalize on.
I think that animation really has a chance to be that significator that hopefully drives tourists to Latvia. This summer, we met several people in Riga who had come there just because of Flow, because the film is very popular, especially in South America. So that’s it’s an instrument that can really be a part of cultural diplomacy, and that’s why it’s important for us to keep going.
Maybe we can now also attract attention to Latvian live-action movies and documentary cinema, which has a very special poetic tradition. So, yes, it is about Flow, but not only. There’s this other wonderful cinema to discover for everyone, too.
You mentioned a second project that you presented at Locarno…
I have several projects in development and production. I’m co-directing a mockumentary called
I Love You, Lex Fridman! There’s this American podcaster called Lex Fridman, who invites people of different professions to talk about what’s going on in the world and the zeitgeist, including AI, philosophy, the different ongoing conflicts in the world, and so on and so forth. And there’s this Latvian actress Iveta Pole, who lost her job at the theater and eventually moved to Berlin. She’s very, very talented, but she couldn’t work in her profession in Berlin because she didn’t know German, so she worked as a courier. She had this very boring job and started listening to these podcasts. And all of a sudden, while listening to Lex Fridman’s voice, she starts feeling butterflies. And she says, “Matīss, can we make this into a film project? I have this urge to go to America and to tell Lex Fridman that I’m the right person for him.”
Of course, you could say this is kind of delusional, but we explored this fascination with media personalities that you don’t really know. And it ends up being a very funny mother-daughter road trip movie across America, encountering all these different American cultures and parts of America as she’s stalking Lex Fridman. I don’t think Lex Fridman knows about this project, though. We tried contacting him several times, and she wrote letters to him and things like that. So it’s a movie on the border between documentary, because she plays herself in the film, and fiction. It has this blend of comedy and drama.
The way we worked on this project was very peculiar. We went to these different places in America, and we asked people to play themselves, but in situations that we modeled. I’ve never worked in this way where you encounter real personalities and you think about who we could do this scene with and how it should play out.
They are not famous people, but interesting. For example, in Texas, we met a priest who does exorcisms, but he’s also a policeman. So it’s about these strange combinations and really digs into what’s going on in America, even though that’s not the primary through line. We went to 11 states. We started in New York, and we ended up in Texas. So we went through the Carolinas and everything that’s in between, and then Louisiana. We went in April, and we still have some pickups to do, but the film will be finished sometime next year. And it’ll be out sometime next year.
It sounds like you got enough going on, but let me ask if you’re working on anything else in the film space…
At Trickster, I’m working with Ilze Burkovska-Jacobsen, who is doing her first live-action movie, which is a movie about not really belonging to any cultural identity and trying to find your own. It’s about a Latvian teenager who grows up in Norway with her mother, who works there as a janitor, and she finds out that her mother has lied to her and that her father is, in fact, alive in Latvia, and she runs away from home in order to try to reconnect with her dad who has his own problems. It’s also a blend of comedy and drama, kind of like Little Miss Sunshine, where you have this nice blend of tenderness and dark comedy. You could call it post-Soviet humor, humor that’s about this generational trauma that comes from your extended family, or the generations before you, and being unable to deal with this change from the socialist system to the capitalist system.
We’re going to Norway to pitch that, because we’re trying to find a Norwegian co-producer, because it’s going to be set in Norway and in Latvia. Ilze is Latvian, but she’s married to a Norwegian, and she’s living between Latvia and Norway. So she’s very familiar with this being in between two cultures. That project is called Legato, like the musical term. Ilze is also doing an animated film presented in the Latvian pitches at Locarno, not with me, with a different producer.
And a project that I think is very much worthy of attention. It is called Ulya by Viesturs Kairišs and is about a female basketball player [Ulyana Semjonova] during the Soviet times in Latvia. It’s not about basketball. It’s more of a coming-of-age drama. Ulya is two meters-plus tall and a very, very interesting personality with a peculiar history. It is about how this personality was treated in the Soviet Union, somebody who’s maybe considered a bit strange and deviant outside the basketball context.
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