From Signe Baumane, director of Rocks in My Pockets, and My Love Affair With Marriage comes a new animated feature film - the epic story of a tight-knit family that swaps their dreams for survival as the country around them collapses in chaos and violence.
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Set in Soviet-occupied Latvia before, during, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union,
Karmic Knot is a mixture of Drama, Comedy and Horror.
STARRING THE VOICES OF​
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PATRICK WILSON
DAGMARA DOMINCZYK
GRACIE LAWRENCE
EMMA KENNEY
STEPHEN LANG
ERICA SCHROEDER
MATTHEW MODINE
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and 35 top New York and Latvian Actors
For photos, the complete cast, and IMDb links:
THE FATHER
Karmic Knot is in production and will premiere in 2028.
The film is a Latvian / USA co-production and is being supported by grants, foundations, and individual backers, like you.
See Support page to join the team of Karmic Knot Backers
THE MOTHER
SIGNE BAUMANE ON THE ORIGINS OF KARMIC KNOT
One overcast morning in the midst of the pandemic, I was looking outside the kitchen window of my Brooklyn studio when a familiar feeling hit me: the world-as-we-know-it was ending. It was not just the first-world problems that made me feel this way - the undelivered or stolen packages, or the impossibility of getting toilet paper. People had become terrible drivers. During each of my late-evening walks someone always nearly ran me over going through their red lights. Traffic rules didn’t matter anymore. Everybody was following their own rules. Never before the pandemic had I seen people smoking in subway cars. Now it seemed to happen every time I took the subway. The social contracts we had with each other were collapsing.
THE SISTER
This was familiar to me. In the 1990’s I had lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union. Standing in my kitchen I thought I should revisit what my Latvian family and I experienced as the Soviet Union crumbled, throwing Latvia into social turmoil. Perhaps, I thought, this story might be relevant to some of the issues we are going through today.
RAGNE
It took several years to write the script of Karmic Knot - partly because it’s an epic story spanning 25 years, and partly because of the challenges of turning a personal story into compelling drama. Also, aside from the eight family members, there are 50 other speaking characters in the film, and each comes with their own unique perspective.
5 of 50 SUPPORTING CHARACTERS
I believe that animation is the best medium to tell this complicated story, where each point of view or character’s inner thoughts can be represented in different visual styles. The film will employ a variety of animation techniques including stop motion, traditional animation and CGI 3-D.
Background sets for Karmic Knot built, painted, lit and photographed:
For a photographic tour of the Karmic Knot process, go to the Making Of page.
FILM INFORMATION
Title: Karmic Knot
Genre: Animation for Adults, Drama, Comedy, Horror
Producing Countries: Latvia, U.S.A.
Languge: English
Scheduled completion: 2028
Running time: 105 minutes
Budget: $2,600,000
Producer: Studio Locomotive, Riga, Latvia
Producer: The Marriage Project LLC, Brooklyn, NY