“Walking around Riga city there are Flow posters everywhere and people are doing graffiti of cats,” filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis said of the response to his history-making sophomore feature in his home country. “It has provided a kind of uplifting feeling for Latvia.”
The national pride is understandable. On Thursday, Zilbalodis’ Flow earned Latvia its first Academy Award nominations. The film landed Best Animated Feature and Best International Feature from the American Academy. Latvia previously made 15 Oscar submissions before Flow but had never received a nomination. Zilbalodis spoke to us shortly after landing the historic noms on Thursday.
“I don’t know what to think. It’s just quite a lot. It was a very nervous day. We had to wait a long time and I couldn’t get any work done. I was just pacing around and now I’m just relieved and happy. But it’s been a crazy year,” he said.
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Zilbalodis directed the film and co-wrote the screenplay with Matiss Kaza. Flow debuted in the Un Certain Regard sidebar at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, where it was only the second Latvian film to screen in any of the Cannes competitions.
“We finished the film just days before the premiere,” Zilbalodis said. “We were still exhausted from all the work. There was no time to reflect on things. We hadn’t even watched the film with an audience before the festival, so the Cannes screening was the first time we saw it. So when people started to react well in the cinema it was a big relief.”
The film follows a courageous cat that teams up with a capybara, lemur, bird and dog for a perilous journey after their homes are devastated by a flood.
Like Zilbalodis’s first feature, Flow contains zero dialogue and was produced over five years using various sources of public funding that Zilbalodis said allowed him to “scrape by” as he worked.
“The budget is fairly modest. A project like this would probably be impossible in the U.S. system,” he said. “Latvia is a very small country. We are less than 2 million people, so we all the filmmakers know each other quite well. But even though Latvia is a small country, in terms of animation, we punch above our weight. We’re often overrepresented at festivals with animated films. Our filmmakers are often selected and win awards.”
Zilbalodis added that Flow’s awards and box office success — the film is about to become the number one film at the Latvian box office — has “activated” interest in local filmmaking in the eastern European country.
“There’s been a lot more investment in the sector since Flow,” he said. “I think we will soon be building more studios.”
After its Cannes debut, Flow won four prizes at France’s Annecy Fest in June. Further screenings were held at Busan and Toronto, where much of the film’s awards buzz was birthed. Sideshow and Janus Films released the film in U.S. cinemas last November. The film won the Animated Feature Golden Globe earlier this month. Despite his international success, Zilbalodis said he has no immediate plans to leave Latvia.
“I want to stay in my studio in Latvia,” he said. “We have a great crew here. I love the freedom that we have here and I want to do something very different from Flow. People have been pitching more cat films, but I want to do something very different, something that challenges me. I might do more films with animals at some point. But I’m pretty sure it won’t be a Flow sequel. ”
That project, Zilbalodis told us, will feature his first work with dialogue.
“Dialogue had been one of those things that I was afraid of, but now I’m excited about it,” he said. “It’s still a very visual film in a way that can only be done in animation. Like with Flow, there are cinematic techniques that are very ambitious and we’re pushing a lot further. So it’s quite technically challenging and I’m doing some tests right now to figure out if it’s possible, otherwise I need to adjust the story.”
The Academy Awards take place March 3.
The post Gints Zilbalodis On How ‘Flow’ Has “Activated” Local Film Investment In Latvia & Avoiding Pitches To Produce A Sequel appeared first on Deadline.
