Is It Easy to Be Young? -Trilogy

The documentary “Is It Easy to Be Young?” (Vai viegli būt jaunam?) by the famous Latvian film-maker Juris Podnieks, released in 1986 not only tracked and immortalized a period of increasing economic and social liberalization, but actually played a part in developing it. In the late ’80s, Latvians’ longing for freedom and the changes brought by perestroika coalesced in the National Awakening (Atmoda), a time of protests, discussion of previously forbidden topics and feverish activity. Within just a few years this had led to the successful restoration of the country’s independence, following almost fifty years of occupation by the Soviet Union. The film draws attention to the people that the official Soviet ideology pretended not to see: underground musicians, punks, Afghanistan veterans, junkies, protesters; and, by expanding the boundaries of what was possible, helped set in motion further changes.

The impact “Is It Easy to Be Young?” had when it appeared in cinemas in January 1987 has been compared to a bomb going off. Seemingly everyone wanted to see the film, and everyone was talking about it – not only in Latvia but throughout the whole Soviet Union, and even beyond its borders. Gaining international attention for the way it gave an insight into the situation of Soviet youth at the onset of perestroika, the film was eventually seen by 28 million viewers and shown in 85 countries.

As Ābrams Kleckins (1933), a screenwriter who worked on “Is It Easy to Be Young?”, has observed, the film came out at exactly the right moment: even six months earlier, and it would have simply been banned and would not have reached screens, whereas if it had been released six months later, it would not have had the same resonance, because by this point, these problems were being widely discussed, both in the media and in documentary cinema.

After Juris Podnieks untimely death in 1992 at the age of 41, his friends created the Juris Podnieks Studio in Riga, managed by Antra Cilinska, who had worked with Podnieks on the film. Ten years after the release of the original film, Cilinska tracked down the heroes of the original film, in order to find out how the years that followed had changed them – which resulted in 1997th “Is It Easy to Be… After Ten Years” (Vai viegli būt… pēc 10 gadiem). There had been a lot of changes: the baby seen in the first frames of the original film was now celebrating her tenth birthday, one-time model student Juris was now studying at a prestigious business school in London, the former punk Sonita had grown into a fashion designer. But some had found the interim period extremely difficult: Raimonds, who had been given the harshest sentence of all for the vandalism of the train carriage, felt the experience of imprisonment had wrecked his life.

A further instalment in the series “Is It Easy… After Twenty Years” (Vai viegli… pēc 20 gadiem) appeared in 2006. Like the other two instalments in the series, it ends with scenes from “Sea of Hope”, a surreal amateur film obliquely concerning the predicament of ’80s youth, directed by one of the original young interviewees, Igors Linga, now known for his work on music videos.