Competition Programme  

"It's just so good," a little girl sighs. Such a tiny package yet it makes so much soup! But how is that delicious chicken soup made, and where? The film Soup is the story of a trip in search of lost time. Only instead of Marcel Proust's Madeleine cookie, the chicken soup by Podravka, well remembered by many generations in former Soviet countries and in Eastern Europe, is the triggering element. Instant soup, imported from the former Yugoslavia and now still being produced in Croatia, together with compulsory watching of TV broadcasts of Soviet leaders’ funerals are some of the brightest memories of a Soviet child. The film is director Maira Dobele’s personal journey back and forth in time. It begins in present day Latvia, in the director’s childhood kitchen in Liepaja and continues to Croatia – involving people, places, situations and memories in the restoration of a legend of taste, and in finding proof of the uninterrupted flow of time. “Will I ever outgrow that soup?” – she asks.

Festivals

DocPoint Helsinki Documentary Film Festival, Finland, 2012

Maira Dobele

Maira Dobele (b. 1976) represents the most striking debut in the Latvian prose for teenagers in recent years. Her first book, The School of Living Wrong (Liels un Mazs, 2008), earned critical praise and received the Annual Literature Award 2008. Her everyday milieu, though, is documentary film. Since 2006, she has been studying documentary film making at the Helsinki University of Art and Design. She also works on ideas for television reports about the Nordic countries for the Latvian production company Vides Filmu Studija and contributes stories to Latvian Public Radio and the monthly magazine Rīgas Laiks.