Cat on My Mind: Laila Pakalniņa’s Meditation on the Space Between Photography and Film
by Silvia Bahl
At the 26th goEast Festival in Wiesbaden, Silvia Bahl examines how Laila Pakalniņa’s Cat on My Mind (Es domāju par kaķi) transforms undeveloped Soviet-era photographs into a fluid, essayistic meditation on memory, perception, and the porous boundary between still and moving images.
Cat on My Mind (Es domāju par kaķi) opens in darkness, with sound. Gravel. The texture of an unseen place. A cat appears, crosses the frame over loose stones, and vanishes. Behind it, a white bag falls out of a waste container, unnoticed by the workers from a dustbin lorry. When the camera finally moves toward the small plastic carrier, it does so not as a cut or a glide but as a walk: we hear the footsteps of the person behind it, following the impulse of someone deciding to look more closely at something thrown away.
The bag contains photographic negatives from the late Soviet period in Latvia, shot between 1968 and 1978 and never developed. The film that follows is built around them—directed by Latvian filmmaker Laila Pakalniņa, whose observational eye, attuned equally to absurdity and tenderness, has taken her films to Un Certain Regard at Cannes—where her short documentaries The Ferry (Prāmis) and The Mail (Pasts) received the FIPRESCI Award in 1996—as well as to the Berlinale and Locarno.
The negatives Pakalniņa found fall into two distinct groups, suggesting different photographers—and from this she constructs two characters: Anton, a father, and his son Raitis. The first part of the film is set in a rural Latvian village during the late 1960s. We are introduced to Anton obliquely: his hands loading film into a camera, a child’s voice commenting aloud from a manual about film exposure, and two early shots that reveal nothing but their own perforations. He has become the village photographer, and the demands follow accordingly: a piglet to be advertised, a birthday held against time. His son Raitis watches from the sidelines, less interested in being portrayed than in the apparatus itself—already, quietly, becoming the next photographer, as we see in the second part, when the family has moved to an urban area.
Pakalniņa does not reconstruct the world of the photographs through conventional narrative. There is no chronological continuity, no explanatory frame. Instead, the film builds what might be called a mental space around each image: sometimes adopting the photographer’s point of view, sometimes observing the act of photography from an unexpected angle, or lingering on the texture of a place. The effect is less a reenactment than a form of inhabitation—the film thinks its way into the photographs rather than illustrating them.
This produces, among other things, a remarkable comedy. Pakalniņa understands that the spontaneous photograph is structurally related to the joke: both depend on catching the world at exactly the right—or wrong—moment. In one sequence, a military brass band on the soundtrack is suddenly overlaid with the squealing of pigs and barking dogs. In another, a man throws a cat from his arms; the film freezes the animal mid-flight and cuts to a photograph of a truck lifting off the ground during an off-road race. These juxtapositions are not merely amusing. They articulate something precise about two recurring modes of photography: the spontaneous image that captures movement in the act of its completion—what Henri Cartier-Bresson called the “decisive moment”—and the posed portrait, in which people consciously arrange themselves before the lens, performing their own historicity. Both modes carry their own form of tenderness.
What is technically distinctive about Pakalniņa’s approach is her transfer of the imperfections of amateur negatives—blur, misfire, double exposure—into the moving image itself, achieved without post-production. Using mirrors, knife-edge reflections, glass surfaces, and in-camera effects, she makes the film stock behave like the photographs: unstable, permeable, time-sick. The result is a surreal beauty that is not decorative but structural. These images are not documents to be decoded but sensory presences to be experienced. The camera’s perspective floats; scenes bleed into one another through sound before the image follows; the gaze remains associative. We are inside a process of remembering, not observing a reconstruction.
Particularly striking is the decision to keep sound running over photographic stills. When the original negatives appear—frozen, grainy—the soundtrack continues. Life presses on around the arrested image. The photograph interrupts cinematic time but does not isolate itself; it remains porous, open to the present, echoing what Marcel Proust described as involuntary memory: not retrieval but sudden return.
The nostalgia generated is real but unsentimental. It emerges through resistance—the unexpected cut, the withheld explanation, the refusal of narrative comfort. The feeling is akin to discovering a box of anonymous photographs and being overwhelmed by the density of ordinary life: gatherings, gestures, shared rituals. A key moment gives the film its title: Anton, asked whether he is present, replies that he is thinking about a cat—the one that escaped him earlier. It is a minor gesture, but it defines the film’s logic. The camera drifts, wanders, remains slightly elsewhere—curious, elusive, attentive to what escapes capture.
The cat itself inevitably recalls Chris Marker, for whom the animal recurs as a figure of elusive perception—from Sans Soleil (1982) to Chats perchés (2004). Pakalniņa’s film belongs to this essayistic lineage, where memory, fiction, and reflection form a single movement of thought.
Certain images carry historical resonance—the Soviet presence, collective rituals, parades—but the film avoids monumental history. Instead, it remains with lived experience: minor gestures, shared spaces, fleeting pleasures. In one striking sequence, a close-up of Raitis’s eye resembles a camera shutter—an insatiable recording device. Later, the same framing is given to a cat. Its gaze absorbs everything, inscrutable, accompanied only by the sound of purring.
A recurring anxiety concerns the limits of the photographic medium. “The film is not endless,” someone remarks—a warning against excess. Each frame matters. And yet the impulse to record persists. In contrast to the infinite reproducibility of digital imagery and AI-generated visuals, Pakalniņa insists on the singularity of the photographic trace: light physically inscribed at a specific moment. As Roland Barthes described it, the photograph embodies the “that-has-been.”
What the film adds is the visibility of interpretation itself. It does not resolve uncertainty but preserves it. Where contemporary image production tends toward seamless completion, Cat on My Mind keeps its gaps open. That openness is not a deficiency but its central principle.
The film unfolds at the pace of memory—unhurried, attentive, and committed to the overlooked. It suggests, quietly but insistently, that nothing truly disappears: even what is discarded retains the possibility of return.
Silvia Bahl
© FIPRESCI 2026