Hometown pride in Riga after ‘Flow’ wins Latvia’s first Oscar

Flow,” a wordless cat parable that became the first Latvian film to win an Academy Award, prompted a sleepless night for Latvians celebrating the historic accolade.

“Flow” won the Oscar for animated feature at Sunday’s 97th Academy Awards in Los Angeles, which aired starting at 2 a.m. Monday, in an upset over DreamWorks Animations’ “The Wild Robot.”

The Oscar statuette is the latest source of hometown pride for the Baltic country of nearly 1.9 million people who have embraced “Flow” and filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis in droves since the world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024.

The National Film Centre of Latvia calls the film “an unprecedented phenomenon in the history of Latvian cinema.”

More than 320,000 people have watched it in theaters across Latvia, an audience larger than any other film screened in the country in the last 30 years, according to the film center. And over 15,000 people over 10 days visited the Latvian National Museum of Art to see the film’s Golden Globe Award — also Latvia’s first — on public display in January.

After thanking his cats and dogs during his acceptance speech, Zilbalodis acknowledged the momentous nature of his win. The film was also nominated for “Best International Feature Film” at the Academy Awards.

“This is the first time a film from Latvia has ever been nominated,” Zilbalodis told the Los Angeles audience. “So it really means a lot to us. We are very inspired and we hope to be back soon.”

Latvian musician Ralfs Eilands called the pre-dawn ceremony as “indescribable! The best sleepless night in my life!” in a post on X.

The film — called “Straume” in Latvian — is a peaceful, yet post-apocalyptic, fable about a black cat, dog, capybara, ring-tailed lemur and secretary bird trying to survive a catastrophic flood. The film has no dialogue and forces viewers to be mesmerized by the unlikely relationship and understanding between the species trying to escape the rising waters.

“This is a great and historic day for Latvia! And we will all need time to understand what happened, because something big and beautiful occurred!” Latvian President Edgars Rinkēvičs wrote on X following the win. MDT/AP