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SOVIET MILK

MĀTES PIENS

By Ināra KOLMANE

Drama - Completed 2023

A mother, a talented gynecologist, who has denied her daughter breast milk, loses everything in the conflict with the Soviets, and now her young daughter has to take care of her. Based on the bestselling novel by Nora Ikstena, published in more then 2o countries.

- Year of production
- 2023
- Genres
- Drama, True Story, Female director
- Countries
- LATVIA
- Languages
- LATVIAN
- Budget
- 1 - 3 M$
- Duration
- 110 mn
- Director(s)
- Ināra KOLMANE
- Writer(s)
- Arvis KOLMANIS
- Cast
- Maija DOVEIKA, Rūta KRONBERGA, Elīna VASKA
- Producer(s)
- Jānis JUHŅĒVIČS (FILM STUDIO DEVINI), Marta ROMANOVA-JĒKABSONE (FILM STUDIO DEVINI)
- Synopsis
- A young promising doctor loses everything in a conflict with the totalitarian Soviet regime - career, love for life and even parental instinct depriving her of baby mother's milk. But as a grownup, her daughter becomes her sole supporter who tries to help her to cope with depression while learning to survive in the depressing Soviet regime herself. Life stories of mother and daughter take place in the Soviet-occupied Latvia between 1945 and 1989 when the Soviet Union collapses.
  
  “I did not want to live, and I did not want her to drink milk from a mother who does not want to live."
  
  “All the twenty years I was with my mother, I could not ask her why she pulled me – a baby, a small, helpless baby – away from her breast. I could not because I did not know it yet back then. And perhaps this was an inappropriate question because as a result of a life twist I had to become her mother.”
  
  The basis of the concept embedded in the film:
  - reflection of interpersonal and social relations as well as historical processes through lives and standpoints of two women.
  - human life and actions facing the reality of limitations and contradictions of the totalitarian regime, reflecting the identification of the experiences of the inner world in different situations by tracking the (im)possibility of personality growth under the regime.
  
  These motives will penetrate the film and form its ideological framework by laying the dramatic base on the conflict between the human desire for free self-realization and development and the tendency of the ruling political regime to control everything and everywhere.
  
  The film is based on the bestseller “Soviet Milk” by Latvian writer Nora Ikstena – a renowned name in Europe and author of more than 20 books. The English version of the book has just been published by publishing house Peirene Press and it's also available in many other languages.
- Partners & financing
- Creative Europe MEDIA, National Film Center of Latvia, State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia, DEPO, TET, UMEDIA, U-fund, Belgian Tax shelter, Latvian Foundation, etc.
- Beginning of shooting
- Sep 15, 2020
- End of shooting
- Sep 15, 2021