Gints Zilbalodis

Gints Zilbalodis is a Latvian filmmaker, animator, and composer born in Riga in 1994. He became internationally known through animated films in which he has taken on unusually broad creative responsibility, including writing, directing, animation, and music. Before making features, he made a sequence of short films: Rush (2010), Aqua (2012), Priorities (2014), Followers (2015), Inaudible (2015), and Oasis (2017). These projects established interests that would continue in his longer work: solitary journeys, landscapes, visual storytelling, and characters whose emotions are communicated with little or no spoken dialogue. His first feature, Away (2019), follows a boy who wakes suspended from a parachute in a tree on an island. He travels across the island on a motorcycle while a large dark creature follows him. Zilbalodis made Away almost entirely himself over roughly three and a half years, handling its animation, design, sound, music, writing, and direction. The film won the Contrechamp Award at the 2019 Annecy International Animation Film Festival and received the Golden Goblet for Best Animated Feature at the 2019 Shanghai International Film Festival. His second feature, Flow (2024), places a cat in a world apparently emptied of humans after a catastrophic flood. The cat joins other animals, including a capybara, dog, lemur, and secretarybird, aboard a boat moving through flooded terrain. Like Away, Flow has no dialogue; its narrative depends on animation, animal behavior, sound, and image. Zilbalodis directed and co-wrote the film with Matīss Kaža, and he composed its music with Rihards Zaļupe. Flow premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. It later won the Jury Award and the Audience Award for a feature film at Annecy in 2024. In January 2025, Flow won the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature Film, becoming the first Latvian film to win a Golden Globe. At the 97th Academy Awards, it won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature and was also nominated for Best International Feature Film, Latvia's first Academy Award nominations. This made it the first Latvian film to receive Academy Award nominations and the first to win an Oscar. The achievement gave Zilbalodis a historic place in Latvian cinema. Flow was produced as an international co-production involving Latvia, France, and Belgium. Its recognition placed a dialogue-free Baltic animated film at the center of major festival and awards conversations worldwide. Across Away and Flow, he has developed feature animation through independent production methods and highly visual, wordless narratives.