Duration ............... 1h 42m 6sOverall bit rate ....... 1838 kilobits/sec
VideoFormat ................. H.264, High@L3.0Average bit rate ....... 1560 kilobits/secFrame rate ............. 25.000 frames/sec, constantFrame dimensions ....... 696 x 474 pixelsDisplay aspect ratio ... 1.565Bits/(Pixel*Frame) ..... 0.189
Original Audio (Swedish with some English, Latvian, Danish)Format ................. AAC, stereo, 48.0 kHz, 16 bit, VBRAverage bit rate ....... 103 kilobits/secGerman DubFormat ................. AAC, stereo, 48.0 kHz, 16 bit, VBRAverage bit rate ....... 83 kilobits/secSpanish DubFormat ................. AAC, stereo, 48.0 kHz, 16 bit, VBRAverage bit rate ....... 85 kilobits/sec
Subtitles1 (default) ............ English for non-English dialogue2 ...................... English including English dialogue3 ...................... Minimal Swedish subs4 ...................... Swedish for non-Swedish dialogue5 ...................... Dutch
A stray life raft containing two dead men washes up on the Skåne coast, and Wallander gets embroiled in post-Soviet international intrigue.
Video quality is decent, not great -- similar to The Faceless Killers, perhaps even a little noisier, especially in dark scenes. I've cropped to remove letterboxing but retain as much of the picture as possible, and the result is a semi-widescreen AR of 1.565 (about 3:2).
This movie was shown on Swedish TV on 10 November 1995, presumably as a single episode. It was released in a German-dubbed 2-episode version, and the German version was in turn re-dubbed in Spanish. The German/Spanish 2-episode version includes a few noncritial scenes somehow missing from the Swedish version posted here (Kurt and Boris walking on the beach, Kurt and Eva having a drink, a longer scene in the police archives) so I did some cutting to sync them with this single-episode version, which has better (ie, a little less awful) picture quality.
The subtitle choices here are a little complicated because there is a large amount of non-Swedish dialogue in this show: Latvians communicating with Swedes in English and Danish, and with each other in Latvian. I've redone the English subtitles into two tracks: most English speakers will do fine with the default sub track (#1), but because some of the characters speak very broken English (and for the hard of hearing) track #2 adds their lines as well. Most Scandinavians will probably understand English and Danish, so will be best served by track #3, which translates only a small amount of Latvian. (Most of the spoken Latvian isn't subbed at all, as it's usually being translated in real time by one of the onscreen characters.) Track #4 adds Swedish subs for the English and Danish, and track #5 has complete Dutch subs. The Dutch subs are credited to NLOndertitels.com; the others are uncredited.
Many thanks to Henning Mankell, the cast and crew of Hundarna i Riga, and the German and Spanish voice actors who created the dubs.
Did you know?- Formerly an independent city-state, Riga was captured by Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus in 1621, and was in fact Sweden's largest city until it was taken by Russia under Peter the Great in 1710.
- At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union's Red Army defeated German forces occupying Latvia but remained after the war ended, turning Latvia into a communist puppet state. 160,000 Latvians fled, mostly to Sweden and Germany. Another 140,000 dissenters were captured and sent to the Gulag by the army and KGB.
- The notorious KGB headquarters in Riga was jokingly called the tallest building in the city because from the top, one could see all the way to Siberia. It currently houses a commemorative monument known as the Black Door.
- Latvia declared independence from the U.S.S.R. in 1990 during the mostly-peaceful Singing Revolution, along with fellow Baltic states Estonia and Lithuania. In 1991 thousands of residents built barricades on the streets of Riga to repel a Soviet invasion, but only small skirmishes took place.
- In the summer of 1991, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev survived a coup attempt by military and KGB hardliners who wanted to reassert control over Latvia and other satellite states. In response, the independence of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania was recognized, which began the official dissolution of the U.S.S.R.
- In 1992 (when Mankell's novel was published, presumably also the year the story takes place) Latvia issued its own rubles, equal to Soviet rubles, as a transitional currency. The ruble was worth about a penny at the time, making Liepa's 10-ruble bill on the poker table about a dime and Wallander's 300-ruble underwear about $3. Latvia transitioned from the ruble to the lats in 1993, and plans to move to the euro in 2014.
- When Kurt and Baiba communicate "in Scandinavian," he speaks Swedish and she speaks Danish. This is the typical way Scandinavians of different countries communicate, as their languages are similar enough to be mutually intelligible.
- The Hill of Crosses in northern Lithuania is a popular pilgrimage site, associated with Lithuania's struggle for independence from Russia (and later the U.S.S.R.). More than once it was bulldozed by Soviet authorities, only to be rebuilt by the Lithuanian people. It had about 50,000 crosses when Wallander visited, and over 100,000 today.
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