Gints Zilbalodis

Gints Zilbalodis is a Latvian filmmaker, animator and composer whose work has brought Latvian animation to prominent international festivals and award ceremonies. Born in 1994, he developed early short films around wordless storytelling, mobile camera perspectives, isolated characters, and landscapes marked by threat or uncertainty. His shorts include Aqua (2012), Priorities (2014), Followers (2015), Inaudible (2015), and Oasis (2017). They led to Away, his first feature, released in 2019. His short films established techniques later developed in his features.

In Away, a boy wakes on an unfamiliar island after surviving a plane crash. He travels across its varied terrain on a motorcycle, accompanied by a small yellow bird, while a looming dark figure pursues him. The film contains no spoken dialogue, relying instead on visual action, music, and sound to convey the journey. Zilbalodis made Away with striking personal control: he directed, wrote, animated, composed its music, and handled sound design. The production took more than three years, and he used the game engine Unity to create its computer-generated environments. It received the Contrechamp Award at the 2019 Annecy festival.

His next feature, Flow (2024), expands this visual approach into an animal-centered survival story. A cat, displaced after a flood devastates its home, finds refuge in a boat occupied by other animals, including a capybara, lemur, bird, and dog. The animals must coexist as the water carries them through a transformed world. Like Away, Flow has no spoken dialogue. Zilbalodis directed it and co-wrote the screenplay with Matīss Kaža. Rather than making the film alone, he worked with a larger international production group, including Latvia’s Dream Well Studio, France’s Sacrebleu Productions, and Belgium’s Take Five. The collaboration broadened his production resources.

Flow premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. It became an awards success for Latvia. At the 2025 Golden Globes, it won Best Animated Feature Film, making it the first Latvian film to receive a Golden Globe. It then won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 97th Academy Awards, Latvia’s first Oscar. The film’s recognition placed Zilbalodis alongside studio productions while reflecting a smaller-scale production model. His films are notable not for their minimal dialogue but for using framing, rhythm, movement, and musical structure as the primary means of narrative expression.