Raitis Abele
Writer / Director
Latvia, Germany
Raitis Abele is a Latvian filmmaker, born on a snowy October day in 1983 in Riga, Latvia. He studied filmmaking at the New York Film Academy and later earned a Master’s degree in clinical psychology from the University of Latvia, where he is now a PhD student. Raitis collaborates with his brothers Lauris (director) and Marcis (cinematographer), forming a creative trio. In 2014, Raitis and Lauris co-directed Castratus the Boar, which won the Grand Prix at the Tampere Short Film Festival in 2015. His feature film Troubled Minds (2021) explores mental health and artistic identity. Raitis also composes and performs in the rock bands Soundarcade and Sonntags Legion, blending his artistic and psychological insight into all his work.
Project
Wagner and Satan
In 1837 Riga, 29-year-old streetwise con artist and fabric merchant Peter — a self-proclaimed grandson of Count Cagliostro — lives with his father Janus, a once-feared occultist now lost to dementia. When 26-year-old, debt-ridden Richard Wagner enters his back-alley shop, Peter’s charm — and the charged undercurrent between them — draws Wagner into Riga’s shadow world of forbidden lodges, pagan rites, and candlelit séances. In a trance-like ritual, Janus guides Wagner’s hand to a crumbling manuscript — a fusion of Baltic paganism, Egyptian magic, and Dionysian cult hymns — said to summon madness in those who hear its music. Wagner steals it and begins to decipher it, falling under its spell, his obsession turning him into something dangerous, even to his wife. For the first time, Peter begins to believe his father’s fevered prophecies. In a rare lucid moment, Janus gives his son a crooked ritual knife, warning only he can stop the curse — Wagner. But as Richard tries to flee, voices begin to haunt him; after a storm-lashed sea voyage, he hears the first ghostly melodies of The Flying Dutchman.
