Lior Shamriz


Lior Shamriz is a writer, producer, and film director. They reside in Berlin and in Los Angeles.

Career

Born to a Kurdish-Iranian Jewish family in Ashkelon, a city in southern Israel, they skipped the army at 18 and moved to Tel Aviv where they began working on collective art publications and computer generated music. They attended the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School until being expelled in 2004. Critical of Zionism and Israeli nationalism in press interviews and in their film work, Shamriz immigrated to Berlin in 2006, pursuing graduate studies at the Institute for Time Based Media of the Berlin University of the Arts.
Dimitri Eipides from the Thessaloniki International Film Festival noted that Shamriz "develops his own écriture, experimenting with form, deconstructing narratives and reconstructing their pieces into something unique, which bears his own personal trademark".
Their first long film, Japan Japan, a micro-budget independent production, was presented at about fifty international film festivals, among them the Locarno International Film Festival, the Sarajevo Film Festival, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema and MoMA's New Directors/New Films Festival where chief film curator Rajendra Roy had noted it as one of the top ten film of the year. A controversial and polarizing film, it tells a kaleidoscopic story of a young queer pacifist drop-out who is unable to leave Israel, juxtaposing saturated pop music, pixelated virtual travelogues with poetry by Constantine P. Cavafy and Charles Olson, together with dramatic scenes and pornographic imagery.
Saturn Returns, their next long film, premiered opening Torino Film Festival's Onde, was nominated for the Max Ophüls Preis at the film festival in Saarbrücken, Germany and co-won the New Berlin Award at Achtung Berlin film festival. Return Return, a non-narrative video based on clips from Saturn Returns, premiered at the 60th Berlin Film Festival’s Forum Expanded, where later The Runaway Troupe of the Cartesian Theater and Cancelled Faces would have their world premiere as well. In addition to long films they created many short films, winning awards at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in 2013, 2014 and 2015

Filmography