UPURGA Trailer Exclusive: River Rafting Gets Dangerous And Weird in Latvian Thriller

Andrejs is an adventure guide who is afraid of real adventures. But that's what he gets when his sister, an influencer, goes missing in the valley of a wild river, together with a vegan-sausage advertising crew. Facing ancient forces of nature, Andrejs' deepest anxieties awaken as he engages in a futile search that pushes his body and mind to the extreme. During his journey, the young man will meet locals such as a silent cabbage fermenter and a weird brotherhood of hunters who speak a language totally of their own. They are the protectors of a wondrous natural phenomena, haunting and beautiful at the same time. Andrejs doesn't know that every path in this strange forest leads exactly to the thing you are looking for - but to find it, you must first get lost.

Latvian director Uģis Olte (LIBERATION DAY) swaps documentary for fiction with his visually stunning feature debut UPURGA, which will have its world premiere in the Baltic Competition of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (Nov 12-28). Olte unleashes mystical forces of nature on an unsuspecting party heading down a remote river to shoot a vegan sausage commercial. Only their river guide Andrejs has an inkling of what lies ahead.

 

Having made his mark as an internationally recognized documentary maker with LIBERATION DAY (Sundance Now) in which he and co-director Morten Traavik brought the Slovenian band Laibach to North Korea, Olte worked with that film's same cinematographer Valdis Celmiņš to create the otherworldly universe of UPURGA, where the everyday can turn dark in a heart-beat.

 

Director Uģis Olte: "I grew up in the Latvian countryside. This fact comes with serious side effects. I have been desperately lost in a forest that I know by heart and begged a gang of wild boars to leave me alone when I accidentally entered their lair. And once I almost drowned twice in the same day in a creek that is only a foot deep. UPURGA is my personal sense of those ancient forests, rivers and small villages translated into fiction."