Flow

Gints Zilbalodis's Flow (Straume) won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2025, becoming Latvia's first ever Oscar, and, more remarkably, becoming the first dialogue-free animated feature ever to win the category. The film also won the Golden Globe in the same category and was nominated for Best International Feature Film. Zilbalodis made the film over five years, partly using free open-source animation software (Blender), with a budget of approximately €3.7 million.

The film follows a solitary black cat in a flooded world. As the water keeps rising, the cat is forced onto a small unmoored sailing boat with a slowly accumulating crew of equally stranded animals, a labrador, a capybara, a secretary bird, a ring-tailed lemur. The film unfolds across what is broadly a single journey toward higher ground, with no human characters, no dialogue, and no anthropomorphic-speech translation. The animals communicate, when they do, through animal sounds.

The film's commitment to a sustained register of patient observation (the cat's instinctive reactions to other animals, the visible logic of an animal mind) produced one of the most distinctive animated features in many decades. Rihards Zaļupe and Zilbalodis's score, structured around a recurring orchestral theme that operates as the film's quasi-narrative voice, is among the most beloved animated-feature soundtracks of recent years. The film became a permanent reference point in any subsequent discussion of independent European animation's commercial possibilities.