“We beat James Cameron!” the filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis said with a shy smile during a recent video interview. “Flow,” his second animated feature, is now one of the highest grossing films ever in his native Latvia, surpassing even Cameron’s “Avatar” franchise at the local box office.
Latvia has a population of roughly 1.8 million people, and “Flow” has sold more than 255,000 admissions since it was first released in August 2024. The film is still playing in Latvian theaters.
“We still have sold-out screenings in week 23 now,” Zilbalodis, 30, said.
A critical and commercial success, Zilbalodis’s computer-animated, dialogue-free film follows a group of animals helping each other survive a flood. It received two Oscar nominations last month, for best animated feature and best international feature, and is the first Latvian production nominated for any Academy Award.
Zilbalodis also recently won Latvia’s first Golden Globe, beating out two major American studio contenders, “The Wild Robot” and “Inside Out 2,” in the animated feature category. That “Flow” is an independent production largely financed with public funding and conceived on free, open-source software called Blender, makes the victory feel even more of a feat.
And the director’s Baltic homeland is not being subtle about their joy over this triumph. The Golden Globe was exhibited for a week at the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga, the country’s capital, guarded by two cat statues, in an allusion to the movie’s protagonist, a dark gray feline.
Thousands of people lined up to see the trophy. “It’s just a really nice boost of morale,” Zilbalodis said. “People are tired of bad news and maybe this film represents something that feels optimistic and hopeful in regard to the country’s self-esteem.”
Riga has turned into a walkable “Flow” celebration. Posters with the animal characters decorate the streets since Zilbalodis was honored as “Riga Citizen of the Year 2024.” A sign of the city’s name now has a sculpture of the “Flow” cat perched atop the letter A.
When Zilbalodis returned to Latvia after winning the Golden Globe, the filmmaker was welcomed at the airport by his team of collaborators as well as the country’s minister of culture, the head of the National Film Center, and plenty of eager journalists.
“You could say Latvia is experiencing Flow-mania,” Matiss Kaza, one of the film’s producers, said via email. “You literally cannot walk the streets of the capital city of Riga without noticing the cat in one form or another.”
The Latvian president, Edgars Rinkevics, has repeatedly expressed pride over Zilbalodis’s accomplishment on social media, and the filmmaker has even received a call from the prime minister, Evika Silina.
“There are people in Latvia who can create the Flow that is currently followed by the world,” President Rinkevics posted on X after the Golden Globe win. “Great moment for the team, great moment for Latvia!”
Yet, the attention that Zilbalodis and “Flow” are getting came as a shock to the system for the timid, soft-spoken animator, who admits he’s often struggled with impostor syndrome.
Kaza suggested having a watch party for the Oscar nominations announcement with press in attendance, but an anxious Zilbalodis opted for watching at home.
“Gints is more introverted than me; he used to disappear from the office from time to time during production when he needed time on his own,” Kaza said. “It is just his way of working, and as a producer, I have to respect that.”
Taking a page from a video the Swedish filmmaker Ruben Ostlund posted when he missed out on a nomination in 2015, Zilbalodis recorded himself eating an apple and hugging his dog, who was a comfortable distraction as he waited to see if “Flow” would be mentioned.
“I’m not very expressive with my emotions,” he said. “I had so much excitement in that moment, but maybe it doesn’t come through.” The video was posted on the director’s YouTube channel, and also to his account on X, where he has shared behind-the-scenes content from the production of “Flow.”
The son of a painter mother and a sculptor father (who also worked as a cinema projectionist), Zilbalodis started making animated shorts in high school. He gravitated to animation because it’s a medium that he, as a young man lacking confidence, could explore on his own.
“I felt frustrated to have all these abstract thoughts and I couldn’t make other people understand me,” he said. “I felt through filmmaking there was a way to do that, and it might take a very long time, but I can express these things that I need to express.”
Zilbalodis’s parents were supportive when he decided to skip university, especially since there is no animation school in Latvia. Instead, Zilbalodis made his debut feature “Away,” another fable without dialogue, about a boy and a bird on a desolate island, virtually by himself.
“I was afraid of dialogue and afraid of working with actors,” he said. “With animation, I could avoid that and just tell stories with images and sounds.”
He taught himself the software to animate the characters, as well as how to do sound design and even basic music composition to score the picture. “My goal was to learn all these skills so that eventually I could work with experts in these fields, and I could understand what they’re doing and communicate better with them,” he said.
For “Flow,” the filmmaker established his animation company, Dream Well Studio, out of necessity after a partnership with another company fell through. “Had I known that we would have to start our own studio, I wouldn’t have done it,” Zilbalodis said. “It’s good that the circumstance forced me to figure things out.”
The transition from working alone to managing a team of collaborators proved challenging.
“When I was working alone I just had an idea and did it,” he said. “This time these ideas were questioned, which can be great because they have more intention to be in the film.”
The “Flow” craze has reached far beyond Latvia. Here in the United States, the animated adventure, which opened in theaters in late November, has become the all-time highest-grossing release for the distributors Janus Films and Sideshow, bringing in $4 million so far.
Zilbalodis is particularly surprised by the reception in Mexico, where the film opened on 800 screens — more than in any other country — on Jan. 1. “There’s real appetite for films like this, that gives me a lot of hope,” he said.
The filmmaker is also hoping that the success of “Flow” will encourage the government of Latvia, and those in other countries, to fund unconventional films more generously, not as charity, but as profitable, relatively low-risk investments that could potentially help boost tourism. “People around the world who might not have heard about Latvia will now have heard about it,” he said.
The post One Wordless, Animated Cat Movie. Two Oscar Nominations. appeared first on New York Times.
