Latvia made a splash at the 2025 Oscars by winning the best animated feature award for Flow. The small Baltic country’s submission for the 2026 best international feature film Oscar is, again, an animated movie. But Dog of God, from director brothers Lauris and Raitis Abele, is very, very different from Flow, including being a genre film and being much more graphic and provocative.
While director and producer Gints Zilbalodis‘ Flow told the dialogue-free story of a solitary cat’s emotional journey, Dog of God is set in the 17th century and focuses on a woman accused of witchcraft and how her trial uncovers the existence of a werewolf. Rooted in Latvian folklore, it explores such themes as tribalism, the role of power elites, religion, and dogmatic thinking and rhetoric. The result is a frenzied fever dream full of horror, sexual desire, and myths.
The brothers co-wrote the script with Ivo Briedis and Harijs Grundmanis. The voice cast features Regnars Vaivars, Jurgis Spulenieks, Kristians Karelins, Einars Repse, Agate Krista, and Armands Bergis. Producing the film were Raitis Abele for Tritone Studio and Kristele Pudane, with Giovanni Labadessa serving as a co-producer. Media Move is handling global sales on Dog of God, for which ESC Films acquired the French rights for the project.
“Dog of God was a strange and intense experience — even in the making, it often felt like we were chasing something wild and unknowable,” Lauris and Raitis Abele said in a statement ahead of the film’s world premiere at Tribeca.
The Abele brothers talked to THR about Dog of God, how they originally planned it as a live-action movie, and why they hope to provoke debate rather than being politically correct.
The film’s story is inspired by actual events that took place “60 kilometers from where we live,” Lauris tells THR. And the belief in witchcraft and related ideas is still widespread. “We’re a Christian country, but we’re quite pagan.”
The brothers’ unusual cinematic voice stems from their appreciation of things that surprise them. “We like weird cinema, surreal cinema,” Lauris explains. “There are new narratives which we could see emerging [more and more], because everything is so calculated and very commercialized these days. For commercial product, you can’t afford experiments or weird stuff.”
While Dog of God was initially planned as a live-action story, animation helped with the brothers’ interest in pushing the envelope.
After the brothers’ psychedelic first feature film, Troubled Minds (2021), about their experience with a bipolar artist friend, Raitis was asked to work with the team of the Latvian animators of Flow. “I was helping them out with our studio, and I was just in this environment of animation experiments,” he recalls. When the Dog of God script didn’t get the hoped-for reaction from the country’s film center and various people the creatives pitched it to, Raitis suggested the animation approach. But Lauris was against it.
But when an animator friend of theirs created some sketches, things changed. “Lauris said, ‘Oh, this is something that we would like to watch ourselves,’” Raitis tells THR. “So, we changed the script to go more fairy tale, because animation opens up more possibilities.”
The brothers are happy with that choice to this day.“Animation gave us freedom,” Lauris tells THR. “In an adult animation world, we can go to hell rather than filming with a blue screen or finding real caves. It gave us a lot of artistic freedom. There are not many boundaries. We could do pretty much anything.”
Or, as Raitis puts it: “What we say when we introduce the film is, ‘and now for something completely different’.”
That also means that Dog of God is different from the Latvian animated hit Flow, even though some animators worked on both movies. “Our film is absolutely on the other end of the spectrum,” Raitis emphasizes. “And the reaction from the film center was also positive. They liked this film, and they liked that it’s different. If it were similar, but did not reach the same heights as Flow, that would be bad. It’s very hard to compete with somebody who got an Oscar. But we went in the opposite direction. Flow has opened doors for Latvian animation. But it’s also good for the Latvian Animation Association that we are showing different kinds of films.”
The brothers are particularly proud and happy that Dog of God has found audiences beyond genre festivals.
And that even though the film includes “pagan sexuality that is very pre-Freudian,” as Lauris says. “I guess that was the care everywhere around Europe [back in the day]. The Canterbury Tales, for example, or The Decameron. So this is kind of our naughty, pre-Christian, pagan stuff.”
Raitis shares that Latvian and Baltic folk songs were one of the inspirations for Dog of God. “We have 12 thick volumes of folk songs, and number six has naughty folk songs,” he tells THR. “In school, we were not allowed to read that.”
Despite its local inspirations and setting, core themes of the movie feel universal and current. The brothers say they like the idea of the audience wondering if some of the things that take place in Dog of God could be happening today. “Evil ideas and human flaws do not go in circles, but in spirals,” offers Lauris. “And these things and more can happen these days. They are kind of archetypes – from witch hunts and hypocrisy to human desires.” Is there a hero in the film? “We say, Oh, these days all the heroes are dead. So, we don’t have any good characters in this film.”
The werewolf character in Dog of God is based on the trickster archetype, Raitis explains, highlighting: “He’s neither bad nor good.”
The brothers often hear that viewers see their movie as criticizing the church. “No, it’s not criticizing the church,” Raitis says. “It’s a critique of dogmatic thinking, abuse of power, and hypocrisy. That can come from a church, a government institution, a company, or whatever.”
What is next for the Abele brothers? They have already received funding for their next film, a live-action feature called Wagner and Satan. “We still want to be in this genre environment, because we fell in love with genre after going to the various festivals,” Raitis explains. “This audience feels very good to us, and we feel good to them.” The movie is based on a true story, “but of course, we are twisting it in all directions,” he adds.
Richard Wagner lived in Riga and worked as a conductor before he became a famous composer. “The fact is that when he left Riga, he decided he would become a composer and just change his life. So definitely, there was a Faustian pact that happened here in Riga,” argues Raitis. “And as we have all these pagan traditions, we are mixing that in. So, we put Wagner before he was Wagner in this world, where he makes a pact with the devil. It’s also based on one quote from Wagner that he was so close to composing music that would make the whole world go mad. And we believe that he stole some pagan manuscript from here with this music. And later, the whole world did go mad for a certain period of time.”
Concludes Lauris:” Even if it’s a genre film, as a young person, Wagner was kind of this anti-establishment person, and then when he gained some recognition, he became a monarchist. So it’s also a symbolic deal with the devil and explores when a revolutionary becomes establishment.”
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