Laila Pakalnina 

Latvia/Germany/France
 

Laila Pakalnina's The Ferry (1994) and The Post (1995), both under 20 minutes in length, are little more than a pair of poetic, long-take documentaries about everyday life in the Latvian province. They belong to a series of black-and-white shorts, that take the pulse of the common people and are, in her own words, "nothing out of the ordinary". This  cycle of eleven "spiritual shorts" bear such simple titles as And (1988), on the national awakening in Latvia; Linen (1991), about the delivery of linen to a children's hospital; and the self-descriptive Anna's Christmas (1992).

Now she's back in the Certain Regard with her promising debut as a feature film director: Kurpe (The Shoe), a Latvian-German-French co-production. In line with her aesthetic vision, it's again shot in black-and-white "because the interplay between light and shade is very valuable — shooting in black-and-white offers richer nuances than in colour and leaves more to the imagination."

The Shoe, set in the late 1950s at the height of the Cold War, is a delightful, tongue-in-cheek comedy set in her native town of Liepaja, at that time on the western coast of the Soviet Union and a security zone jealously guarded by border patrols. During the day the townspeople could use the beach, but at dusk a tractor leveled the sand in order to determine at the first light of dawn whether "spies" might have entered the country via the sea route. One summer morning, three guards discover footprints in the sand - and a woman's shoe, apparently left behind by a "dangerous enemy". So they set out on a mission doomed to failure from the start: like in Cinderella, every woman in town has to try on the shoe. 
Ron Holloway