THE SHOE

The late 1950s. In Liepāja, a port and border town in Western Latvia (and birthplace of the director), vigilance is the order of the day. Alas, boredom is too. A single shoe has been found and now the search is on for the corresponding lady who lost it, conducted by three soldiers. Why exactly? Well, because our Cinderella is suspected of being a foreign spy, of course. Laila Pakalniņa’s cinema is a veritable school of the absurd, as is THE SHOE, her fiction feature debut, which was shown in Cannes. The camera and accompanying thoughts glide slowly across a bizarre wasteland rutted by violence and the surveillance that becomes the epitome of societal transformation (as stalemate).