IN FOCUS: LIOR SHAMRIZ

Few other filmmakers defy national attributions like Lior Shamriz. Living and working in Berlin, Korea, the USA, China, and Taiwan, the Ashkelon-born director already presented two films at last year’s festival and will tell us more about his Berlin extravaganzas for the official opening of this year’s BERLIN ART FILM FESTIVAL. Shamriz‘ unique style, his often brave and playful formal decisions and his unconventional perspective of Bohemian life in the city make him and his films the perfect starting point for the coming days.

A LOW LIFE MYTHOLOGY

The lives of young, creative, but precariously living artists was already the topic of Lior Shamriz‘ no-budget ride SATURN RETURNS, which we showed last year. With a cleaner look and a tricky video-art-in-film narrative, he vaguely reprises his themes and introduces us to enigmatic Mana Avaris, a Berlin Film School dffb student who struggles with love, money and her visa. Divided into various chapters that circle around a bunch of Mana’s friends and lovers, A LOW LIFE MYTHOLOGY takes many detours into the cinematic worlds of its protagonists and keeps a lot of visual surprises in store. Oscillating between a realistic look at young Bohemians in Berlin and self-referential artifice, Shamriz‘ film is once again a wonderful testament of a filmmaker who can’t be labelled or pinned-down.

Lior Shamriz, D/ISR/US 2012, 80 min
with: Nina Fog, Johannes Hendrik Langer, Kirsten Burger, Patrizia Cavaliere, Imri Kahn
cinematography: Marco Armborst
languages: English, Hebrew (with English subtitles)
guest: Lior Shamriz, Nina Fog (actor)

BEFORE THE FLOWERS OF FRIENDSHIP FADED FRIENDSHIP FADED

„We have our life, you have your life. Keeping social contacts all the time is a full-time job“, says the woman (played by filmmaker Irene von Alberti) to the man they used to be friends with. „Over the years, we haven’t met much, and I changed“, the friend says. Scored with an enjoyably over-dramatic soundtrack and using alienated voice-overs for the characters, FLOWERS is an everyday story of people drifting apart, told with the right amount of Shamriz craziness to ask yourself what the film might actually be about. Shot around Hermannplatz, this unusual Berlin short turns familiar hang-out areas into the sites of personal mysteries.

Lior Shamriz, ISR/D 2007, 7 min
with: Alessio Bonaccorsi, Stephan Geene, Irene von Alberti
cinematography: Lior Shamriz
languages: English (with English subtitles)
guests: Lior Shamriz, Irene von Alberti (actor), Alessio Bonaccorsi (actor)