From: naddy@mips.inka.de   
      
   Having never seen any Latvian TV show or movie, or heard an appreciable   
   amount of spoken Latvian, my interest was piqued by _Padomju džinsi_   
   (Soviet Jeans), a recent Latvian TV show, possibly available on a   
   streaming platform near you.   
      
   Riga, Soviet Latvia, 1979.  Three young people: Renārs (Kārlis   
   Arnolds Avots), a tailor with black market connections; Tiina (Aamu   
   Milonoff), a Finnish theater director; and Māris (Igors Šelegovskis),   
   a KGB officer.  They are drawn into a cat-and-mouse game between   
   an underground factory that produces knock-off Levi's jeans and the   
   KGB operation to find the source of the subversive pants.  The show   
   is a dramedy that lays bare the utter corruption of the Soviet   
   system.   
      
   It turns out that the "Latvian" dialogue actually flips back and   
   forth between Latvian and Russian.  Since I know neither language,   
   simply distinguishing the two is already an effort for me.  (Akanye   
   helps.) I assume there are a lot of sociolinguistic details that   
   I'm missing.  The Finnish character doesn't speak the local languages   
   either and communicates in English, which is the third major language   
   of this multilingual TV show.  Interestingly, some of the older   
   generation Latvian characters occasionally try to fall back to   
   German.   
      
   I'd recommend the show on its own, although I personally never   
   experienced the Soviet Block, apart from a short trip to Moscow in   
   1989 as part of the entourage of a diplomatic mission--and what a   
   depressing experience that was.   
      
   --   
   Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)