Cinema
Is It Easy to Be Young?
Vai viegli būt jaunam ?
Juris Podnieks · 1986
Synopsis
The film opens on a concert by the rock group Pērkons in Ogre, allowed to play again after being banned in 1983. On the train back to Riga, some young people wreck a carriage; they are arrested and tried in public, and the camera follows the hearing. Then come a young girl who has just given birth, a soldier back from Afghanistan, punks, a Krishna follower, a brilliant schoolgirl and a young mother worried about her daughter after Chernobyl: a generation that official ideology pretended not to see.
Context
Shot in 1986, the documentary was released in Latvian cinemas in January 1987 and in June received the international critics' prize at the Kraków festival; it was screened out of competition at Cannes the same year. The Lithuanian Universal Encyclopedia sees in it the complicated relationships of young people and their conflicts with their surroundings, against the background of a dreary Soviet reality. Its screenwriter, Ābrams Kleckins, would say that it came at the right moment. Antra Cilinska later found the same young people again, ten and then twenty years on.
Who it is for
A direct documentary without emphatic commentary, best seen with the end of the Soviet Union in mind.
Prizes and reception
Seen by twenty-eight million people in eighty-five countries, and included in the Latvian Cultural Canon.