“You will be mine!…” are the first words silently uttered by the Black Knight in the oldest Latvian feature film, Lāčplēsis, addressed to Laimdota. This was the beginning of our cinema history, and the starting point for the evolution of fateful women and heroic men on screen.
The characters seen in these films, and the actors who portrayed them, were no ordinary people. They were objects of worship. Meanwhile, real people gazed upon these “gods of the screen” and dreamed that greatness would one day enter their own lives—that they would encounter equally lucky breaks, be loved and desired by beings just as beautiful and flawless, and that evil would be defeated while the good would triumph, suffer beautifully, or sacrifice themselves.
In this production, the audience follows characters from iconic Latvian films—Edgar and Kristine (Purva bridējs), At the Rich Lady’s, Blow, Ye Wind!, Lake Sonata, Theatre, The Mills of Fate, and others. These characters transform into one another, experiencing vastly different or strikingly similar relationship models and twists of fate. Actors embody recognizable film heroes, reliving various Latvian cinematic stories from the silent era to the present day, creating an associative look at how cinema has constructed our perception of male and female roles.
The creative team’s source of inspiration is the first feminism-based study of cinema in Latvian cultural history—Inga Pērkone’s monograph I Can Only Love… (Es varu tikai mīlēt…). It analyzes archetypes of Latvian femininity and explores the representation of various female roles in film, prompting the question: what would be the perception of our society and its development if films were our only source of information?
The production was created with the support of the Boris and Ināra Teterev Foundation during the Valmiera Theatre’s 2025/2026 season. As this powerful collaboration continues, four new productions are being staged in the new season.
Roles are shared by: Inese Ramute or Baiba Valante
