FEATURE FILM - 110 minutes - DRAMA

Synopsis

A promising young doctor loses everything due to her conflict with the totalitarian Soviet regime – her career, love for life and even her mother’s instinct to deny breast milk to her baby. However, the grown-up daughter becomes her only supporter who tries to help ease her mother’s depression and learn to live in the depressive Soviet regime herself. The lifelines of mother and daughter flow in occupied Soviet Latvia from 1945 to 1989 when the Soviet Union collapsed.

“I didn’t want to live, and I didn’t want her to drink milk from a mother who doesn’t want to live.”

“Over twenty years that I spent with my mother, I couldn’t bring myself to ask her why she pulled me, a helpless babe, away from her breast. I couldn’t because I didn’t know it yet. And perhaps it was an inappropriate question since I ended up being her mother.”

The story is based on the bestseller Soviet Milk by the renowned Latvian writer and more than 20 book author Nora Ikstena. It has just been published in English by Peirene Press as well as translated into many other languages and published in more than 20 countries– UK, Italy, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Hungary, Macedonia, Georgia, Sweden, Ukraine, Syria, Croatia, Japan, Russia, Spain, Germany, Austria, France, USA, and other. The book was one of the three shortlisted finalists of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) Literature Prize 2019.

Title information

Title: Soviet Milk
Original title: Mates Piens
Director: Inara Kolmane
Production company: Film Studio Devini, Riga
Writer: Arvis Kolmanis
Genre: Drama
Duration: 110 min
Language: Latvian, Russian
Subtitles: English
Theatrical premiere: February 4, 2023, Latvia
Cast: Maija Doveika, Ruta Kronberga, Aleksey Gorbunov, Elina Vaska, Svetlana Stolyarova