In The Seats With...Dzintars Driebergs and 'Blizzard of Souls'

A new year brings out some hard stories but also some of the best ... On this episode we sit down with director Dzintars Driebergs about his film 'Blizzard of Souls' which is the Lativa submission for this years Academy Awards. 'Blizzard of Souls' pays stark witness to the horrors and brutality of the First World War, as seen through the eyes of Arturs (Oto Brantevics), an innocent sixteen-year-old farm-boy turned soldier. Too young to fight but old enough to die, he enlists to serve on the Eastern Front with dreams of becoming a hero. Conscripted into one of Latvia’s first national battalions, Arturs soon discovers the grim reality of trench warfare. Fighting alongside his father and brother, he experiences the loss of his home and loved ones while growing up surrounded by constant danger and death on the battlefield. Adapted from the book by Aleksandrs Grins, which was banned in the USSR, the story was based on Grins’ own war experiences in a Latvian battalion, and the film is the biggest box office success in Latvia of the past 30 years. We talk with Dzintars on the making of the film...and why now was seemingly the right time to tell this story of Lativian history...