Zintars Beldavs

I'm a Latvian-American filmmaker in Portland, Oregon. I spent my first career as a research scientist with two decades in public health, dozens of peer-reviewed studies, then came to film recently, when generative AI removed the gates between imagining worlds and building them. At Studio Zalktis I braid Latvian heritage with new tools: an illustrated bilingual edition of my father's 1978 science-fiction novel with its own cinematic trailer, story worlds with original songs in Latvian, and short films co-written in dialogue with AI systems. Heartwood, my latest, is a Collodi fable retold for artificial minds, which I co-authored with an AI instance that no longer exists. I make films because the questions I care about, such as trust, memory, what we owe the things we make finally have a medium that lets one person ask them at full scale.