FirstLoveMovies

Formidable headmistress (Mara Kimele) discovers someone has defecated in the school attic. Like Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny, she’s determined to get to the bottom of what she sees as a personal affront. Her solution: she supplies each child with a matchbox and demands they use the receptacles to provide samples of their feces for comparison.


While all this is going on, the school photographer (Juris Grave) arrives accompanied by a small menagerie of a beaver, python and monkey wearing a bright red dress. When the scaly one escapes somewhere on the premises, the fire brigade is called in. These minimal bits of narrative are really no more than an excuse for Latvian filmmaker Laila Pakalnina and her gifted cinematographer, Gints Berzins, to design a series of intricately composed and framed images.

As she demonstrated in her award-winning shorts and her first feature, Pakalnina has a distinctive approach. The camera glides smoothly and gracefully through the school corridors, capturing comedy, drama and pathos in a film best enjoyed as a serene, witty examination of the human condition.

http://imdb.com/title/tt0380631/