Or, let's say my life timeline squeezed in a couple of paragraphs:
Three females shaped my identity: grandmother, who was friends with the daughter of a shapeshifter; mom, who knows gypsie's dance; and Zinka, the parrot who drowned in a fish tank.
They gave me a sense of wonder early on and instilled in me a belief that the world was far more magical than it seemed.
Each of them taught me how to listen, laugh, mourn, and tell stories that carry all of that at once.
Alongside people, landscapes changed my language: the Kamchatka Peninsula and the 600 kilometers I walked through it in 2002; a three-month expedition to Western Tibet in 2004, where I was pioneering the Sutlej River; leaving my homeland and moving to Catalunya, Spain, wasn't that exotic, but immigration reformed me no less.
Every journey reshaped my sense of scale—geographic, emotional, artistic. I've learned to see the absurd and the divine in small things.
After people and places, the diseases came on the row: in 2018, I was diagnosed with clinical depression. That moment of collapse turned out to be a doorway. I've lived it over and finally let myself be a filmmaker.
I've lived the lives of an art magazine publisher, a fashion journalist, a baker, a cleaner, a tailor, a painter, a university professor, and a published writer. For years, I've been wearing those lives like Billy Milligan wore his personalities. I'm positive now that it was for collecting stories—they were something I stepped into.
To become a filmmaker, I went to life.
I'm of the disappearing Latgalian ethnicity; I'm of post-imperial culture; I'm of the immigrant background—a natural talekeeper and fairyteller.
I speak from the borderlands, between languages, in the middle of homes, past and future. Stories are the only place I've ever truly belonged. They are where I store my grief, my humor, my resistance—and where I invite others to revoke and remember.