Karmic Knot

As the country around them collapses in chaos and violence, a tight-knit family swaps their dreams for survival and profit, but the ambitions of one of them puts the family knot in danger.

CAST
Patrick Wilson, Dagmara Dominczyk, Gracie Lawrence, Emma Kenney, Stephen Lang, Matthew Modine and 37 top New York and Latvian theater actors in supporting roles.

DIRECTOR SIGNE BAUMANE ON THE ORIGINS OF KARMIC KNOT
One overcast morning in the midst of the pandemic, I was looking outside the kitchen window of my Brooklyn studio when a familiar feeling hit me: the world-as-we-know-it was ending. It was not just the first-world problems that made me feel this way - the undelivered or stolen packages, or the impossibility of getting toilet paper. People had become terrible drivers. During each of my late-evening walks someone always nearly ran me over going through their red lights. Traffic rules didn’t matter anymore. Everybody was following their own rules. Never before the pandemic had I seen people smoking in subway cars. Now it seemed to happen every time I took the subway. The social contracts we had with each other were collapsing.

This was familiar to me. In the 1990’s I had lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union. Standing in my kitchen I thought I should revisit what my Latvian family and I experienced as the Soviet Union crumbled, throwing Latvia into social turmoil. Perhaps, I thought, this story might be relevant to some of the issues we are going through today.

It took a long time to write the script of Karmic Knot - partly because it’s an epic story spanning 25 years, and partly because of the challenges of turning a personal story into compelling drama. Also, aside from the five family members, there are 53 other speaking characters in the film, and each comes with their own unique perspective. In the end, I wrote the best script I have written so far.

SYNOPSIS
Karmic Knot tells the epic story of a family trying to survive in occupied Latvia from the 1970s to early 1990s. The family bargains, compromises, and ingeniously builds their own world, insular from the political reality. When the Soviet Union starts to collapse and shatters their world, the family aspires to rebuild it even more insular than before. One family member, however, has ambitions.

Karmic Knot is a mixture of drama, comedy and horror.

CREATIVE TEAM
Signe Baumane - Director, Writer, Animator
Sturgis Warner - Casting Director, Lighting Designer, Head Carpenter.
Kristian Sensini - Composer

ANIMATION
The film is an animated feature for grown-up audiences. Animation is the best medium to tell this complicated story, where each point of view or character’s inner thoughts can be represented in different visual styles. The film will employ a variety of animation techniques including stop motion, traditional animation and CGI 3D.

STATUS
We started production in June 2024. It is a 5-year process. We have co-producing partners and teams in Latvia that received funding for their part of the process, but in the U.S. we need financing for the Brooklyn studio: designing and creating sets, lighting and photographing them, animating characters, shading and scanning the animation drawings.

CHALLENGES
A lot of people ask if it is easier to find funding for Karmic Knot after the success of My Love Affair With Marriage. While My Love Affair With Marriage made the director better known, it is still difficult to find funding for this new project. Like Signe’s other films, Karmic Knot is an independent animated feature that defies commercial formulas and pushes the boundaries of visual storytelling, taking creative risks that commercial productions are not willing to take.Karmic Knot has an individual, unique artistic vision. We are not working with investors, so here’s the challenge: with grant money scarce and the animation process so time and labor consuming how do we keep working without interruption for the next five years and premiere the film in 2029?

YOUR SUPPORT
Your donation will allow Signe to continuously animate, pay the rent on the Brooklyn studio, and make it possible to hire three young artists fulltime. They will be creating sets and props for the film, shading and scanning drawings, writing exposure sheets and much more. After graduating, many talented young artists struggle to find viable ways of establishing themselves in the animation industry. Our studio, along with your support, aims to help a few of them.

Please visit the film’s website: KarmicKnotMovie.com
Follow the film on Facebook: facebook.com/KarmicKnot