A film about national belonging, featuring Latvian director Alvis Hermanis.

A Latvian fairy-tale film based on Anna Brigadere’s classic play. It follows two stepsisters: gentle, hardworking Maija and spoiled, idle Paija whose trials in the underworld reveal their true natures, with rewards and consequences to match.

The movie shows a young man's life dramatically changed after his friend is murdered. It is ironic - if to look with today's eyes - and nostalgia evoking portrait of marginal society and environment in the early 1990s with allusions to the western cinema - film noir related themes, surrealistic features, avantgard cinema stylization and formal aesthetics.

1990 Latvian film