The Farewell
“The Farewell” is a 40 minutes long film filmed in 2005 by Lior Shamriz in collaboration with the Zaza theater company. A group of misfits must deal with the death of a parental figure, Rosetta. In the absence of Rosetta, the group falls into repetitive behavior interrupted by occasional bursts of violence. In an attempt to escape its despair, the group decides to try and conquer the world.
Film program in Juarez
THE BODY IS A CAGE, THE BODY IS CAGED
This program in 3 parts is best viewed as a whole — as one long essay with 10 films, broken by two pauses. I curated this program from a personal vantage point, juxtaposing works by different visual artists and filmmakers, including my own work, to explore themes relevant to our current challenges. THE BODY IS A CAGE, THE BODY IS CAGED accompanies bodies that move—and fail to move—through the human grid, from borders to cultural mythologies of gender and class. The body is the “I”-Object, our degraded camera-obscura. Anna Zett investigates how dinosaurs came to play a pivotal role in the mythical imagination of the US, whereas Matthew Lax ironically stages what our zeitgeist dictates to be the new kind of body, the computer-generated one, a byproduct of the global hi-tech industry. Cary Cronenwett laments the death of a soulmate who dreamt of pirates navigating through gender. Jaakko Palasvuo addresses a tourist in Milan, while my characters are immigrants in Berlin with a broken sense of home. Forough Farrokhzad documents people in a leper colony, prevented from transitioning back to society. Heinz Emigholz films Robert Maillart’s beamless arched bridges as Neha Choksi crosses water on a boat of melting ice. – (Lior Shamriz)
Film Program – 1
THIS UNWIELDY OBJECT (2014) Anna Zett 47 minutes
The animated dinosaurs of Hollywood cinema meet the petrified ghosts of colonial science. Dig sites become crime scenes, and fossils turn into characters, determined to play a main part in the mythical history of the US-American West.
BEYOND LOVE AND COMPANIONSHIP (2012) Lior Shamriz 18 minutes
Eleanor, an Israeli experimental musician living in Berlin (“I think that Germany is responsible for 9/11”), discovers what ruins her life.
Film Program – 2
BRUNT DRAMA (2018) Matthew Lax 7 minutes
Androgynous figures struggle to execute various labors within a bleak, vacuous monoculture. Addressing the inherent violence of the real and the simulated, as well as the dubious pleasure of witnessing, narratives of safety, risk and use-value are tested via 3D-rendered, plastic surrogates.
CIRCUIT TRAINING (2015) Anna Zett 13 minutes
Circuit Training dedicates 12 minutes of screen time to a nameless deity of secular culture, alternating between states of rest and attention. In the boxing ring – a square in fact – monologue is promised to turn into dialogue, despite the vulnerable materiality of the human nervous system.
BLADDER (2018) Jaakko Pallasvuo 9 minutes
An essay film exploring transitory embarrassment, travel and independence.
FOR FLO (2013) Cary Cronenwett 11 minutes
A requiem by transgender filmmaker Cary Cronenwett to his late friend and collaborator Flo who died at the Haiti earthquake of 2010.
ICEBOAT (2013) Neha Choksi 13 minutes
Iceboat is a video of a performance in February 2012. The artist dresses in white, as if a renunciate or a devotee, and sets herself to row a boat of ice until the boat melts and releases her into the waters.
Film Program – 3
L’AMOUR SAUVAGE (2015) Lior Shamriz 25 minutes
Lost love, lost artistic collaboration, the two are meeting for one night as she briefly visits the city where he still lives.
THE HOUSE IS BLACK (1963) Forough Farrokhzad 22 minutes
A 1963 short documentary by poetess Forough Farrokhzad, looking at life and suffering in a leper colony.
MAILLART BRIDGES (2001) Heinz Emigholz 24 minutes
In this captivating and informative documentary filmmaker Heinz Emigholz continues his exploration of architecture as autobiography by examining the work of legendary bridge-builder Robert Maillart, who revolutionized concrete based construction.
Call for Actors (Los Angeles)
I’m sharing an initial call for actors for an upcoming project.
I’m looking to cast a few different roles for a scripted long-form episodical / art film.
* All genders, accents, ethnicities. Mainly 25-40 but not only
* Los Angeles area
* Paid
* Please add a personal introduction, headshot, resume, reel & send it to contact[at]spektakulativ.com
Please forward to whomever might be interested.
http://blog.spektakulativ.com/2018/07/19/call-for-actors-los-angeles/
THE PRESENT – a 4 weeks workshop in Los Angeles
Film director and artist Lior Shamriz leads a 4-week intensive workshop expanding the realm of performance for the camera. This workshop will be using the live process of recording as means to create a framework for extended representation.
THE PRESENT – will focus on the construction, representation and manipulation of what we call “the present” – as an individual experience and as a shared, common ground, and the function of that common ground as a tool within civil society.
Performers and film makers are invited to explore methods for creating the “illusion of the real” with film director and artist Lior Shamriz. THE PRESENT is a workshop for those who want feedback on a long term project in an intimate setting and also for those who desire to make a new project within the class. Collaboration is invited among participants but not expected. We will examine examples from film history and visual culture, experiment together in class and work on individual projects.
Lior Shamriz was born in Ashkelon on the East Mediterranean, lived a decade in Berlin and is now based in Los Angeles. They create essayistic narrations that utilize cinema as performance and the cinematic languages as a process of reflexive documentation. Their work was presented at over a hundred international film festivals, including the Berlin Film Festival (2010, 2013, 2015), Locarno, Torino, Frameline, venues such as MoMA NY, awarded prizes at the Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage (2013, 2014, 2015).
Saturdays – July 7-14-21-28, from 1pm till 4:30p
RSVP to contact@spektakulativ.com. Suggested price $70-110 for the whole month (4 meetings)
PAM Residencies. 5810, 1/2 N Figueroa St, Los Angeles, CA 90042
THE NIGHT in Frankfurt
DIE PUPILLE – Kino in der Uni
09.07.18
Artist Talk in Provincetown MA
December 3 2017
Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown
24 Pearl St, Provincetown, Massachusetts 02657
Installation in Hollywood
Installation at Visual Artists Group, 5239 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles.
Corduene Meditation Site and Mirrors for Princes. November 24-26 2017
”
Visual Artist Group is happy to present a new iteration for Lior Shamriz’ Corduene Meditation Space, made especially for the space in Hollywood, Los Angeles.
Side by side to the meditation space we will project Shamriz’s film MIRRORS FOR PRINCES within the gallery.
Meditating on the meaning of territory, nationhood and the trauma of the self, Shamriz re-imagines a 5th century Corduene (Modern day Syria/Kurdistan) religious site for healing and appropriates it for contemporary setting within an art gallery. Through a story of a 5th century massacre and a specific designated “game” rules, setting the installation in Los Angeles allows us to bring to light questions on the relationship between the American White diaspora with its ancestral Europe, in particular within the art community.
The site was first set up in Seoul in spring 2017.
Screening at Amiens Film Festival
Cancelled Faces at Amiens Film Festival France. http://www.filmfestamiens.org/
Images from filming
Images from filming “The Sludge of Nanjido” in Seoul in spring 2017.
The project is sponsored by SeMA – Seoul Museum of Art Nanji Residency, Goethe Institute & ifa Germany.
Installation at SeMA Nanji
KURDANAYE SITE FOR HEALING – an installation at SeMA Nanji Seoul.
Meditating on the meaning of territory, nationhood and trauma of the self, Shamriz re-imagines a 5th century Kurdanaye religious site for healing and appropriates it for contemporary setting within an art gallery. This parallel duality of irony and spirituality is a site-specific variation on the artist’s idiosyncretic cinematic language that often combines these two contradictory elements within the framework of a performative experience. It alludes to very contemporary concerns as travel bans, globalization and surveillance at the same time that it conveys a timeless spiritual simplicity. In an act of somewhat defiance against a current zeitgeist, to experience the site’s spiritual property the visitor is obliged to avoid witnesses and the truthful sharing of his experience. The only permitted and possible account of the visit is a false one. In addition, a set of three rules determines who is eligible to enter the territory – a person who hadn’t committed murder in the last three years, physical assault in the last month and who hasn’t been in the area of the Western Roman Empire.
Read the story behind the installation and its special set of rules here.
L’AMOUR SAUVAGE on VHS
L’AMOUR SAUVAGE on VHS. Coming out July 1.
25$ + Shipment (includes digital download)
! LIMITED EDITION ! Preorder at contact@spektakulativ.com
