The evening events of the Moving Baltic Sea Festival in Riga were organized by our Partner organization 2Annas, who themselves created one of the best known independent film festivals in Riga. The focus was put on the film screenings as well as on a bunch of musical events, that took place around the brand new location of the Dirty Deal Café, in a renovated warehouse close to the Dauga River. Unfortunately, the Dirty Deal Café and with it the Festival Location had to move from Andrejsala, where everything was planned to happen originally, because the new owner of the beautiful and romantic place had decided to kick out all arts people and alternative events (instead he opened “First Baltic” there, a suspicious high end russian disco run by Mosow people).
So we had to adapt to the new circumstances and therefore our festival was at the same time the opening of the new location of Dirty Deal Café. The films as well as the music program attracted an interested local crowd and you could very well see, that the PR of our partners was aimed at a specific target audience, with which we all felt quite comfortable. The atmosphere was very friendly and I felt in a way like in the Berlin of some years ago, when those kind of events where not so crowded and more in a family way in comparison to today. The trashy backyard of the club was the scene for our open air film screening on Friday and finally our huge paper fishes (workshop results from Rostock) found a dignified place to be admired: together with some spotlights pointing at them they were hung up inside the roofless ruin of a warehouse, overgrown with bushes and trees, and created a mysterious installation.
The Saturday screening of “Colors of Green” was planned to be held directly at the riverside while the sunset bar people from Riga would play their DJ Set inside an old pedestrian tunnel just next to it. But as usual the weather changed all our plans: when everything was ready, rain and storm almost blew our screen away so that the screening had to be moved inside the tunnel. Nevertheless it was a beautifull setting with the sight on Daugava River behind the screen and much more dryer than outside.
The Sunday, the last day of the festival will stay in everybody‘s mind definitely. First the screening of the 48-hour films surprised us with the high quality of the films. Nine teams had turned in their films on time and entertained the audience, which had to fight for a place to see, because the club was packed with people. In the beginning of the Competition all the teams had been locked in one room for 12 hours. They were handed out newspaper articles referring to different ecological topics. Their task was for them to comment on these articles with a short film. During the first twelve hours scripts and storyboards were developed and pitched to a jury and in the following 36 hours the films were shot and edited.
After that and thanks to our spontaneous nature and the curiosity of our hosts we finally decided to launch our silent disco again. As there was no possibility to do it since Rostock, everybody of the crew had been waiting for it a long time. It took us only one hour to organize everything and as soon as we were ready, people cued up for the wireless headphones and tuned happily in one of the two channels to choose from.

It was the only party ever were two DJs could play their set next to each other for the same crowd and the people decided what they prefer. And if the next song wouldn’t be as good, you just switch to the other channel and keep on dancing. So you could see one guy dancing in trance to some electronic song next to a group of girls jumping and singing along loudly to Madonna.
The silent disco is definitely the discovery of our tour, although we brought the headphones mainly for the translation of the panel discussion. I had never expected it to be so much fun and I am so much looking forward to our closing event in Berlin – hopefully with a silent disco. Whatever!

Thanks again to our new Riga friends – thanks Singalong Crew & Dirty Deal Café, we had a great time!