Rocks In My Pockets
Austrian premiere in presence of Signe Baumane!
- Latvia’s official entry for the Oscar 2015 for Best Foreign Film
- Best Feature Film at ANIMATOR – International Animated Film Festival Poland 2014
- Winner of the FIPRESCI Award at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2014
“With ‘Rocks In My Pockets’, Signe Baumane presents a sharp, surprising and funny animated feature, plumbing the depths of depression via her family history. Guided by Ms. Baumane’s almost musically accented voice-over, this hand-drawn debut feature is based upon the mental struggles of her Latvian grandmother and other relatives. It’s told with remorseless psychological intelligence, wicked irony and an acerbic sense of humor.” (Nicholas Rapold, NEW YORK TIMES)
A main feature of Signe Baumane’s movies is the pointedly handling of difficult and controversial subjects. She speaks frankly about issues a lot of people try to avoid, her biographical series Teat Beat of Sex (2007) is an impressive example for her creative cutoff of an inner and social censorship. Now Signe Baumane’s first feature film is finished. Rocks in my Pockets – “a crazy quest for sanity” – tells the story of a family. Starting in a not further specified present the narrative leads to Latvia in the 1920s where Anna, Baumane’s grandmother, faces a thoughtful future for she’s well educated and smart. Things become different when Anna marries an adventurous entrepreneur. From now on Anna is facing a life full of suppression. A suicide attempt follows and is kept silent in Baumane’s family for years.
Sounds terrible. But still ‘Rocks In My Pockets’ is an optimistic movie. For it tells not only the personal tragedies within one family that stands for a gazillion families. It also focuses on the process of an emancipation from a disease. Baumane’s voice-over tells the story of her family throughout the whole movie, the filmmaker appears as a protagonist in a crucial position for she is the one that breaks with the female family tradition of a desperate fate. Being conscious about her own depression the fear from a genetic loading is kept under control for Baumane becomes aware of her life as an artist in New York, full of opportunities and creative choices.