Works at : Seoul Art Space_Geumcheon
Stays in : 2013
Website : www.spektakulative.com
Profile
Education
Cal Arts – Visiting Scholar (USA)
University of Arts Berlin (Germany)
Sam Spiegel School For Film Jerusalem (Israel)
Solo exhibitions
Retrospectives:
Ars Independent Katowice (2013)
Thessaloniki Film Festival (2012)
Israel Film Festival Berlin (2012)
Group exhibitions
Selected Screenings:
Berlin Film Festival (2013,2010)
Torino Film Festival (2009, 2011)
Max Ophuels Prize Film Festival (2010)
Sarajevo Film Festival (2008)
Buenos Aires BAFICI (2008)
MoMA NYC – New Directors / New Films (2008)
Nouveau Cinema Montreal (2007)
Locarno Film Festival (2007)
Awards
Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage – 3sat Foerderpreis (2013)
Achtung Berlin – New Berlin Award (2010)
Grants
Grant from German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for Los Angeles, California (2013)
Bambi Foundation – Project Scholarship (2011)
America Israel Grant – Sharett Scholarship (2008)
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The Kitchen Melodrama(working title), 2013, HD Video still
A Low Life Mythology, 2012, HD Video, 80minutes, Germany
The Runaway Troupe of the Cartesian Theater, 2013(Poster), HD Video, 18minutes, China/Germany
Beyond Love and Companionship, 2012, HD Video, 18minutes, Germany
Titan, 2010, HD Video, 48minutes, Satellite film, Saturn
Japan Japan, 2007, HD Video, 65minutes, Israel/USA/Germany
The Kitchen Melodrama(working title), 2013, HD Video, Germany
Saturn Returns, 2009, HD Video, 93minutes, Germany/Israel
Lior Shamriz
My current research revolves around the construction of headspaces in cinema and the formation of reality and sensuality through the relationships between scenery and duration, realness and spacelessness, acting and being.
Meditations on a Multimedia Soul
M. Delgado (Film Critic)
To describe the filmic universe of Lior Shamriz is a complex task. The work of this Israeli filmmaker who is based in Berlin has a vitality and creativity that references not only cinema, but also literature, painting and creates burlesque-like mixtures. On the surface, nothing is serious, nothing is essential, nothing is substantial in the stories that travel from Berlin to Tel Aviv and beyond, but ultimately through paradigms of queerness and saturated cosmopolitanism his films create a voice that is both urgent and inevitable.
Lior Shamriz, born in 1978, writes, produces and directs his short and long films and has his own set of favorite actors with whom he worked over a decade. He's not afraid to work with professional actors, but rather makes clear family relationship by also including friends. He manages a wizard like imaginary narrative deconstruction based on deformation and experimentation of form, in an image that goes beyond its materiality, split, broken and then revived. His films are a unique and singular experience within cinema today.
In his work, there is a strong fear of a prevailing nothingness. There is a fear of emptiness, of being naked, dead, even silent. But the protagonists in the films are beyond an absurd skeleton, or a simple formalistic construction. They do not want to be alone and seek to fix their disparity. They are in a paranoid state of consciousness, insightful wanderers.
In <The Runaway Troupe of the Cartesian Theater> (Germany, China, 2013) the inner voice or ‘cyber-narrator’ is exposed clearly as an introspective and reflective voice, textural and androgynous cybernetic, arising from an understanding of the 'Cartesian theater', as noted openly by the title of the film. There is an ‘I’, the voice of a (female or male) filmmaker who has just arrived in a city in China, invited by a German department of a local art university, an excuse to join a lover of whom nothing is known. The concept of the plot and the disappearance of the beloved rise and take over the protagonist’s only perspective.
After seeing <Saturn Returns> (Germany, 2009) it is impossible not to think of the spirit of Rainer W. Fassbinder, living in Berlin’s contemporary underground scene. The post-punk characters are in midst of a power struggle, of domination and abandonment. Shamriz shows the entire process, similar to vampirism, in which two girls are absorbed into each other, becoming something new, perhaps a death to what was there before and was actually good. The break of happiness and freedom for a choice of a less tumultuous life, based initially on a false and narrow-minded world philosophy, is extremely fascinating, both because it gives a voice to a frustrated peripheral love and because it also subverts the film’s melodramatic aspect and its relation to the tradition of Douglas Sirk.
In <A Low Life Mythology>, these relationships are more complicated, turned into episodes of cerebral rematch, as the character of Mana Avaris dedicates a series of short films to her lover Asten Büchner. To shelter this love-story Shamriz invented a writer, who has presumably written the original story on which the film is based, and whose pseudonym Pierre Menard not only reminds us of Borges, but also of the labyrinthine construction of the film’s narrative. Hence the name Shamriz gives to the film’s style, "an intellectual burlesque", like a life-size maze that is teleported into the filmic realm, in this remarkable film of 2012, extending even further a rich oeuvre about human relationships, mediated by screens, technology and new mechanisms of feelings.
- This article was originally published in Desistfilm and translated from Spanish by Françoise Desrousseaux.
