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Q&A with Rashad Frett

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Ricky.

Let’s start with the script, because it’s so beautifully rendered. It’s co-written, and I don’t believe the short film this grew out of was co-written. Can you talk about that?
Rashad Frett: This was during COVID, 2020. Lin Que Ayoung was a classmate at NYU, a year ahead of me, and she became the co-writer. Initially I was just going to graduate with the feature script for King, another film I’d been working on. Lin Que was like, “Why not make another short and graduate with as much material as possible?” I knew so many Rickys growing up in Hartford, Connecticut. It was a huge Caribbean community. I’m Caribbean myself. So we did the short. I had no intention of this being a feature at all. I kid you not.

The first person to say it could be a feature was our professor, Mick Casale. He teaches screenwriting in grad film. Simultaneously, while I was waiting to shoot the short, Cary Fukunaga started a grant at NYU. I submitted, and ended up winning. Normally you write a thank you letter and that’s that, but he actually wanted to meet and talk about the script. I was like, “Oh, man.” He gave a lot of great notes. From there he posted me on his Instagram, and his agent at William Morris, Craig Kestel, saw it and reached out. When I had a cut of the film, I sent it to him. I’m an editor, but I edit real slow… like, frame by frame. As soon as he watched it, I got signed to William Morris.

Then Michelle Satter from Sundance heard about the short and invited me to apply for the Writer’s Lab. I didn’t have a script. Like I said, I’d just made this film to graduate. Lin Que and I work so well together, so I asked her to co-write. Michelle skipped us around because I guess the first round had already passed, so she gave us three weeks to submit a script. We wrote every day for three weeks. We were like, “We’re not gonna not write.” A couple weeks later we got interviewed, and then it went dark again. Then another interview a month after that, and we found out we got into the Writer’s Lab. But simultaneously, we got into the Sundance Film Festival for the short. I’d been trying to get into Sundance for fifteen years, so it was a shocker. Truly grateful for that experience. From there, it just kept getting bigger and bigger. I’m still trying to catch up with it even being out in theaters. You know when you walk a dog and the dog is pretty strong, and it’s dragging you? That’s the analogy.

Who’s walking who?

Yeah, pretty much.

I wanted it to feel as authentic as possible

Sheryl Lee Ralph plays Ricky’s parole officer, and she caught me off guard when she code-switched. I had to Google her, and I was stunned to learn that she’s Caribbean. I never knew that about her.
RF: It’s interesting. When we first met on Zoom, within the first three minutes, our accents… you know when you talk to somebody from where you’re from and your accent unknowingly switches? We were speaking in soft patois and I didn’t realize it until afterwards. The majority of the cast were of Caribbean descent. Where I’m from, Hartford, it’s a huge Caribbean population. It wasn’t ironic… It was preordained.

I noticed the Artery logo in the credits. Were there invisible VFX shots?
RF: For sure, tons of VFX. Perfect example: I’m ex-military, and I’m big on safety. We shot at my cousin’s house, the scene where Ricky is cutting my nephew’s hair on the porch, and my cousin’s actual address was on the slab. I was like, “We gotta get that out of there.” People will take one little thing and go check it out. So we made up a street, Creek Street, whatever it was, and put that on instead.

We had a 20-day shoot, so everything was go, go, go. I don’t like to be rushed, but the film was making itself tight. I’ll tell you a story… About a month or two before shooting, I had a dream. I walked onto set, and the film was being made without me. Imagine, as a director, you walk onto set and they’re just making your film without you. I was like, “No. No, you’re not.” I woke up, called my producer, I was like, “I had this crazy dream.” And then there were situations on set… similar. I was like, “Wait a minute, this is the dream.” I said it out loud: “This is the dream.” But we worked it out. We smoothed it out, diplomatically.

Talk more about Hartford as a Caribbean community. I had no idea.
RF: At one point Hartford was… well, New York City was number one, then I think Florida was number two, and Hartford was number three. The reason was Hartford was known for picking tobacco back in the day. Even Martin Luther King, as a teenager, went up there to pick tobacco, in Simsbury. That’s how people started settling, back in the 1940s. My family came to this country in the late ’70s, and I was born right when they came up. A lot of history up there.

Can you discuss the inclusion of other consultants in the film itself?
RF: All right, I’m gonna keep it real. I’ve known Felix Soto for a long time. Go back fifteen years. 2010 is when I met Mark Manson, who was a Hartford cop at the time, retired now. Mark wrote a TV show with Felix. Mark had arrested Felix. Felix was part of the Hells Angels, and when I met Mark, Felix was doing fed time for robbing a bank. He got out in 2019. He changed his life. He’s in the church now, has his own carpentry business. I really wanted him in the film. There are certain things I saw growing up, or I knew people who went through it, but to actually speak to Felix… and from the police side, Mark, and my father, the corrections side, and judges, attorneys — I wanted it to feel as authentic as possible. Lin Que and I made sure of that. Our biggest fear was for it to not feel authentic.

So this past fall we got invited to screen at the San Quentin Film Festival. It was me, Mrs. Ralph, Lin Que, and we were in a chapel with eighty, ninety inmates watching the film. I was like, “If we didn’t do it right, we’ll know.” I almost had a panic attack. I think it started mentally. I was like, “Wow, I’m literally in here with…” But by the end, so many of them came up and said, “Wow, this is literally my story.” I was at a loss for words. So much of what I’ve seen out there glamorizes this stuff. Anything I do, I want it to have truth in it. Even if I’m doing genre, some kind of truth in it.

Q&A with Sophy Romvari

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Blue Heron.

Congratulations on this incredible feature debut. I was really taken with the finished look of the film, and I’d love to hear about that as well as the inclusion of what look like real photographs in the film.
Sophy Romvari: Thank you. They are real photographs. This is pretty thematic for me. In my earlier work, I made a lot of short films—which the Criterion Channel is currently streaming! A lot of that work is inspired by the fact that my dad, much like the dad in this film, photographed and filmed me and my brothers growing up. He had a very artistic eye because he studied to be a cinematographer in Hungary, but after they immigrated to Canada, he was not professionally practicing. So he kind of used me and my brothers as his subjects for his own artistic practice. Then he became a graphic designer, which is what you see in the film. I grew up with this incredible treasure trove of photographs, and the way my dad documented things is a big part of how I’ve been able to understand and piece together my own life. I made a short film called Stilled Processing, which is about his photography and about seeing the photographs for the first time on camera as myself. I wanted to insert into this fictional format a similar concept of capturing memories, capturing your childhood, and then having that be what you’re able to hold onto as an adult, something tangible that you can remember people by.

I wanted the film to have an aesthetic that felt intentional but naturalistic

You work with both professional and non-professional actors in this film. Can you talk about the casting and working with your actors?
SR: I’m happy to talk about the casting. It was a co-production between Canada and Hungary, and that’s chiefly because the two actors that play the parents are from Hungary. We tried to find Hungarian cast within Canada, but it’s quite a limited pool of actors, a certain demographic who can speak both fluent Hungarian and English. We worked with the Hungarian casting director, who found the parents, and then we cast the family as you do, to build off the parents. The parents needed to have a believable chemistry, which was how we started to cast with those two. Of course the family itself needed to look similar enough, but they also needed to have chemistry. Then we was cast Eylul [Guven], who plays young Sasha. It was her first audition, first movie, first everything. And she’s quite a talented actor. She was genuinely nothing like her character, actually… she’s very hyperactive and bombastic and intelligent. She’s really acting and it’s quite an experience as a director to work with a child that has such inherent talent.

Jeremy was street cast—he was literally stopped on the street by this casting company we worked with. They interviewed him on camera for about 15 seconds, asked him a few questions. Then I was sent a folder of like a hundred of these clips and I saw something in him, a presence. I interviewed him myself after that and we started to talk about the role. It turned out that he had a lot personal connection to the role of Jeremy. He himself was actually an immigrant from Kyrgyzstan to Canada, and he was adopted and had a very troubled relationship with his adoptive mother. He really felt like this was a fortuitous thing coming into his life; he’d never considered acting. And now he had a write up in the New York Times where they say it’s the best performance in the film, which is for him is incredible. He works at a flower shop. I trusted him and he trusted me. In fact, everyone in the cast really trusted the process and committed to the natural style that I wanted to make the film in.

Instead of rehearsing dialogue, most of the prep I did with the cast was spent creating real chemistry and bonds between the actors so that once we were on set, there was a familial sense between them. Like the two young boys. We didn’t do any rehearsals with them. I just sent them on play dates. I was like, go to the waterpark. Go play video games. I wanted them to have a world together. With Sasha and the mother character, we got together and made latkes, so they could spend time together. And I had the actor playing the dad film them while they were making latkes together. Rather than rehearsing dialogue, it was about creating an actual sense of history between them all. None of the dialogue was ever rehearsed before we shot the film.

I never thought about a Hungarian population in Canada. One of the themes running through this film for me was isolation. You shot Jeremy in isolation a lot, but he’s not the only one.
SR: I try to do as much as I can visually without having it be in the dialogue or without it being explicit and trusting that the audience will pick up on the nuances of the visual language. A big part of that was shooting on Vancouver Island. All the exterior locations you see in the film are set there and it’s a unique geography that I’ve never seen anywhere else. It’s where I grew up and I’ve never seen it in a film. To me, it felt like a very potent metaphor for this family’s experience of feeling isolated, while the backdrop of this very beautiful, striking environment serves as a juxtaposition. They’re also quite literally on an island. And this island is an almost two-hour ferry ride from the mainland of Vancouver. There’s this sense of being removed from the rest of the world, which can be magical, but it also has other implications.

How did you work with your DP? The cinematography is quite remarkable.
Maya [Bankovic] is an incredible cinematographer who’s very versatile. She’s done documentary, she’s done fiction, she’s done television. I knew I wanted the film to have an aesthetic that felt intentional but naturalistic—I didn’t want it to feel documentary, but I also didn’t want it to feel glossy. Naturalism was very important to me, so we decided to shoot a lot of the film on a very long zoom lens, which is a lens from the seventies. It’s an Angenieux lens where you can be yards and yards away from the actor and have this distance, which for me had two implications. One was that we didn’t have to have the camera in the faces of the actors, especially the children. That distance created more of a safe and inviting environment. This is something I learned reading about Cassavetes’ style and how he didn’t want to prioritize technical precision over performance. But I’m also really drawn to that aesthetic, which is a very 1970s kind of aesthetic, and that happens to align with our desire to have the film feel at times a little bit like a home video, but more elevated. We did look at my dad’s home videos as well, and Maya was really inspired by the way that my dad would shoot mundane moments. He wasn’t just shooting birthday parties and events. He was oftentimes like filming through a window without us knowing that he was filming. He was capturing everyday life. We applied that cinematography and that gaze to the film as well because it feels like the film is very much about this relationship and the dynamics in this family, but also about why and how a person becomes an artist or a filmmaker. What are the aspects in this character’s life that result in them becoming who they are? That’s something I’m really interested in, nature versus nurture. Why does Sasha turn out like this, and why does her brother turn out like that?

Q&A with Xander Robin

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of The Python Hunt.

I heard you entered the Python Challenge a year before shooting. What did you learn from that experience?
Xander Robin: Thanks for watching the movie! I actually live in South Florida right now. I grew up there, lived in New York for a little bit, but I was trying to make a movie in South Florida. My producer knew I was struggling to get a film off the ground that I was writing about the exotic pet trade, all about the reptile world. I’ve been devoting my life to making reptile movies, at least for a time. And he said, “what about the Python Challenge?” I’d known about the bounty program Jimbo is part of in the film. There’s a lot of Python influencers, like Python Cowboy, and it’s mostly a success story: people grabbing snakes, “doing our part.” So I assumed they were just everywhere. If you were with an expert hunter, you would find one. But I joined the competition a year ahead of our shoot, and I spent time with so many different hunters alongside my friend Harley, who ended up becoming our casting director. And we saw zero pythons during the 10 nights. I also didn’t understand that it was mostly amateurs. It’s 95% amateur hunters in the competition. It’s mostly a story of failure and of traffic. It’s essentially a publicity stunt.

The python has kind of a friendly face

What kind of safety meetings did you have to have? There’s something very gonzo about being in that environment...
XR: You can’t overstate safety concerns. As a filmmaker, I naturally want to do things that are a little more dangerous. But this was around the time all the Baldwin stuff was happening. So we had a medic on standby for the whole shoot; luckily we never had to use them. The first night of the hunt, you see in the film this Cottonmouth incident. That subject is an eighth-generation Floridian, grew up out there. If you’ve ever read the book “Shadow Country,” his great-grandfather is Ted Smallwood, who owns the Smallwood General Store in Chokoloskee. He’s a storied character, and maybe it was just too late in the night… he mistook a venomous snake for a python. If that had happened, I don’t even know what would’ve gone down. We would’ve had to drive to a hospital. The insurance policy of the film would’ve had to pay for anti-venom. And do we film that? Do I become part of the film, at the hospital? I don’t know what would’ve happened, but I’m glad it didn’t, honestly.

You come primarily from narrative. Did this require changing the way you think about filmmaking?
XR: I’d done a lot of hybrid-type films, which are hard because there’s actually less of an audience for them. Sometimes you’re thinking too much about form while watching the film. To me it was about finding a light touch: when to make it beautiful, and when to make it feel real. That was the balance we were looking for. And trying not to overthink it, just finding the right decisions in the edit.

You’ve said that if anyone’s going to make jokes about Florida, you want it to be you. Do you feel like non-Floridians understand Florida differently than Floridians do?
XR: In the nineties and early two thousands, there was a huge tax credit in Florida for film. So a lot of people would pitch Florida movies and get them greenlit, and some people would shoot Florida for other places. There were a lot of films made in Florida through the lens of an outsider, and it became kind of kooky and zany. And now, with the rule that mugshots are public, the Florida Man situation is sort of a joke; there’s shows about it. So that’s why we were interested in making this film. A lot of the people I grew up with, that I went to film school with and stayed friends with, were all Floridians. So we’re telling it from that perspective, without trying to shove it in your face. And in a way, the character from San Francisco ends up seeming like the weirdest character in the film, versus the people who romanticize Florida.

Some of the most striking images in the movie are the inserts of the snakes and the other animals. Were you there for shooting all of those?
XR: I love the film “Cane Toads: An Unnatural History” and the way they told the story from the cane toad’s perspective. We didn’t do exactly that, but I wanted the snake to have a presence, almost like a human presence. In a way it gives the film some sort of POV. I’m fascinated by reptiles because they’re these creatures that everyone hates and demonizes, but when you get closer to them, they become a little more friendly. The python has kind of a friendly face, even when you see them skin it and see their insides. They have kind of the same insides as we do — just in a different order, all on one line. So I wanted to give them a presence, even if it felt a little more stylized.

Q&A with Joel Alfonso Vargas

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Mad Bills to Pay.

What was the genesis of this film and how did it become a feature?
Joel Alfonso Vargas: It kind of happened during lockdown. I had some projects that I was trying to set up just before that but because of the pandemic, they didn’t materialize. I was spending time thinking. I’m from the Bronx and a lot of what you see in the film was my stomping ground. I was doing a lot of meditating, a lot of sitting in silence, and trying to figure out where my life was going. It was a strange time. I was reflecting on my childhood and the types of guys I grew up around. And I started to think, what happened to those people? I was turning 30 around that time and I was thinking about fatherhood, thinking about having grown up without a father, and trying to reconcile all these things in my brain. This character, this type, kept popping up in my head and that was the first kernel. From there I expanded. I started with an outline first, a real vomit thing—just getting it all down on paper. Then I parked it for a moment. Then I went to film school. I had the opportunity to develop it further at film school, and that’s how it happened.

Every take felt like a fresh interpretation

Did you just have the first act as the short and then it expanded? Or did you always have a clear sense of where it was going?
JAV: It was always going to be a feature. The film school I went to was in London and they didn’t know that I wanted to shoot it in New York City, which was tricky. I really had to fight for it in the end. They backed it as a short. So, we shot the feature and cut it into a short, which is the first act and a half or so. But it was great to have that short because we took it to Locarno and won an award there, and that helped build awareness for the future.

The visual language of this film is so deliberate. It almost feels like a documentary. And the dialogue doesn’t feel like dialogue. It feels like we’re witnessing authentic conversations. There’s no conventional coverage. I know you work with a lot of story beats and improvisation.  What was the rehearsal process like with your cast?
JAV: Yeah, thank you, it was kind of inspired by jazz music. My intention was not to overwrite it and to leave a lot of space to give creative license to my collaborators. I did thoroughly develop the story structure, and I was thinking very deeply of the effect of every scene and backstory. What I didn’t try to touch so much was the dialogue. I wanted to figure out those nuances with the cast. We rehearsed, and we shot the film very quickly. We shot it within 16 days. There wasn’t a whole lot of pre-production. Our resources were very limited so we couldn’t rehearse too much. But we did rehearse for about a day and a half where we went through as much as we could and tore apart the scenes and rewrote them together. We would rehearse little bits before actually shooting a scene. It was always super rushed. I placed a lot of rigor on finding the right cast— that was an extensive process.  

I know you did some street casting. What was that process like?
JAV: Yes. And TikTok. The intention was to street cast the whole film. We got pretty far with someone who we thought would be our protagonist, and he was a recent father. We were curious to work with that, to incorporate that and really lean into the documentary aspects of the film. But three or four days before we were meant to go out, he called us and was like, I can’t do it, I think it’s going to take me away from my family. The week before we had met Juan [Collado], who plays Rico, through Backstage and he ended up working out great. He really rose to the challenge. We found Destiny through TikTok. She was the only true non-actor in the cast. Yohanna Florentino plays Rico’s mom and she had been in my orbit for some time. We had worked on a project before, but not at this scale, so we were excited to work together. She was the first person we cast. Then it became the job of finding actors who were at her level. She’s great, and classically trained. There was a lot of criteria we had to meet in the whole casting process.

When you’re locked off and not focusing on massive shot listings, did you find that the scenes sort of took on new life come the second take or the third take? You might not have been able to achieve that if you had to worry about continuity or traditional coverage.
JAV: A hundred percent. Because we didn’t need to worry about continuity, that meant that from take to take, we could keep the things we liked, abandon the things that we thought didn’t work, and we were almost rewriting the film as we were shooting those takes. Usually by like the fifth take, we’d get something we really liked, and then we could move on. It was very freeing for everybody, especially the cast, because they could try new things and stand in different places. Every take felt like a fresh interpretation, which was awesome.

The visuals of the film almost feel like an anti-New York film. We’re so used to handheld, frenetic pacing. I’d love to hear about how you found the visual language of the film, and the choice to do 4:3.
JAV: I think for me that all began from thinking about these experiences and memories. Just my own experiences of life in the Bronx. Life for us was pretty slow and languid. We’d hang out in front of the building on folding chairs and watch life pass by. In a way, that was what I was trying to capture. But that also intersected with my background, which is semi-documentary. I’ve always been drawn to observational films. I also do photography as a hobby. All of those things came together to give way to that visual language.

And you can see it; there are shots that almost feel like a photograph. I wanted to ask about the scene in the pizzeria place, where Rico is discussing his absentee father, and you have this fantastic quote about how sometimes you have to man down. It’s sort of a light bulb moment.
JAV: Yeah, it really is. Rico is a character that means well, his heart is in the right place, but he’s ill-equipped with the tools to be effective. Whether it’s because he doesn’t have a role model at home or if there’s something more underlying that instigates his self-sabotaging behavior is what we’re trying to explore, in a sense. Juan is acting in this scene, he’s playing a role, but that’s also his story. He didn’t grow up with his father. Neither did I. A lot of the people on the crew, by coincidence, come from single parent households. It was kind of interesting. Juan is really speaking from the heart, and that’s something we see from him throughout the film as well as from the other actors. There’s a conviction that they’re telling a true story.

This is an incredibly accomplished, incredibly clear micro-budget film. Now that you’re on the other side of having made it, is there anything you wish you knew before you started, any misconception of truly independent filmmaking?
JAV: I mean, it’s not romantic. I think we’re all like, it’ll be so free and liberating!  But you have to be more industrious and industrial in order to stretch that money out as far as it’ll go. Our planning and scheduling had to be bulletproof, because there was no slack to make mistakes. Also, don’t rely on the MTA!

Q&A with Sergey Loznitsa

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Two Prosecutors.

I understand this film is based on a story that really resonated with you?
Sergey Loznitsa: The film is based on a story by Georgy Demidov, who was arrested in 1938 and spent nearly fourteen years in prison camps. After his exile, around the 1960s, he wrote his memoirs and short stories. In the 1980s, the KGB confiscated all of his manuscripts. His daughter spent years fighting to get them back, but Demidov died in 1987, never having seen his work published. This particular story was published in 2008 by a press that specialized in repressions, executions, and exiles. I was collecting any material I could find on this topic, and after completing my first film about Stalin’s regime using archival footage, I was looking for a story that could continue what I had already begun to explore. This short story came my way, and I decided to adapt it.

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here

How did you work with your cinematographer on the film’s framing?
SL: For all of my fiction films, I work with the same cinematographer, Oleg Mutu. He comes from the Romanian New Wave and shot some of its most important films, including The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. When I saw those, I was looking for a cinematographer for my first feature, and we’ve been collaborating ever since. Every film is a collaborative process. For this one, the first decision was the format, the classic academy ratio. The second, obvious choice was static images. Then Oleg suggested the color palette. We removed all the lively colors: green, yellow, orange, purple, light blue. They’re completely absent from the film, from the sets and costumes. We also added a filter. All of these tools serve to immerse the audience in a specific place and time. What surprised me is how many directors nowadays are returning to the classic academy format. It wasn’t a conspiracy between us, but there’s something in the air that brings us back to it.

The lighting through the high windows creates a sense of both hope and hopelessness. Can you talk about that?
SL: I hadn’t thought about it that way. There were general decisions we made about the lighting. It was supposed to be soft and tender. If you compare it with Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age, it’s a glimpse of light that comes from darkness. But I’m not linking it to the idea of hope, because the space we are in is completely hopeless. None of the characters are meant to be heroes. They’re all anti-heroes. There is no positive character in the film. They all work for the system; they represent the system. Even if their wishes or desires are somehow wholesome, they are still part of it. Someone can understand what kind of system they exist in, like the older prosecutor… and someone cannot, like the young man. As Dante said, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

The pacing is remarkable. You let scenes fully play out without any rush. Can you talk about that approach?
SL: We are in a place where there is no rush. You could spend ten years within the same four walls, with the same characters and one single thought. I wanted to give the audience an opportunity to pause and reflect, so there’s always a little room, a space in time. The approach nowadays, constantly having to stimulate, to impress, has a lot to do with the era we live in. My film is about a different time, so I have to play by those rules and break through that wall. Maybe it’s also the influence of my documentary work. The perception of an image changes with time. By spending time with an image, we start to notice things we haven’t seen before. That wouldn’t happen if it were fast-paced.

Each performance is magnificent, especially those who communicate more through silence and gesture than words. How did you find the casting process?
SL: Let’s talk about the prisoners as an example. When it came to casting, I requested that we invite people who had actually been incarcerated, and also real prison guards. If I put those two people in front of you and asked you to tell me who was the prisoner and who was the guard, you probably could not distinguish them. I think it’s a quite interesting phenomenon. As for the lead actors, they’re marvelous. The three leads all left Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. It was a fateful decision for all three of them — what they left behind, at least for their careers. But at the time, that wasn’t the first thing they were thinking about. You have to have a certain sense of character, and I think the choices they made as real people, they translated to the characters they play in the film. One challenge I faced was that the young prosecutor and the older prisoner belong to two different schools of acting. The latter comes from the Soviet theater tradition of the 1960s, and the younger actor represents contemporary technique. They’re both in the same scene, and it was an important task to bring those two schools together. Not everything could be resolved on set. The actor who portrayed the prisoner, for instance… all of his vocal work had to be adjusted in post-production to bridge the gap between old-fashioned theatrical speech and the contemporary style.

Where did you find the locations? They look authentically 1930s.
SL: It’s a real prison, built in 1905 and deactivated in 2007. The first time we visited, it was an almost visceral feeling. You could sense the suffering that had accumulated there over the years. Our art directors began to clean the walls, and it took on the look of a film set. The prison cell was actually built inside the gymnasium, because physically it’s impossible to fit camera equipment into real cells. We could move the walls around as needed. The train scene was shot in the same space. For the office, we used an old radio building in Riga, also in the style of the 1930s. Everything was filmed in Riga.