Juris Kursietis’ debut Modris has become the opening film of the NY-based film magazine’s ‘Filmatique’ streaming platform www.filmatique.com
The website www.filmatique.com focuses on streaming art-house and festival films, and Kursietis’ Modris is to be featured alongside Xavier Dolan’s Laurence Anyway, as well as other films by up-and-coming international directors.
U.S. viewers can stream the film free for three months.
The film is available alongside an interview with the director where Kursietis reveals Martin Scorsese to be an influence of his and details plans of his next film, Oļegs, the filming of which starts next year.
Filmatique notes that Modris won the Best Debut Film at the Latvian National Film Festival and was Latvia’s submission for the Foreign Language Oscar in 2015.
Kursietis was awarded Best Director at Tbilisi and Best New Director at San Sebastián.
Modris is a naturalistic portrait of a Latvian teenager adrift in an indifferent, austere society. The title character stumbles through life always on the verge of making a wrong decision: whether in small-time gambling, confrontations with authority figures, or fraught conversations with a mother who doesn’t know how to do her son right.