Tuesday june 8., 7 pm
Recent short films by Lior Shamriz after he had moved from Berlin to Los Angeles and Q&A
Port Saïd, Santa Cruz, Sarmad Kashani (2022, 14 minutes)
In spring 2021, I found myself pulled by two different research projects, one of a person who lived in the 1880s and was being coopted and re-coopted by projections, and the other is a story of a 17th-century poet who, for a moment, managed to escape the self he was shut up in when he was born.
Fetish Puppies Break Free! (2019, 13 minutes)
In 1934 Berlin, a Black Jew who is married to a White German is visited by a friend who urges him to flee the country. A screening of a German expressionistic film about a horny Golem resurrected by a Mark Zuckerberg-type “scientist” is disrupted by a visit of a man from the future.
The Night (2015, 7 minutes)
The cheap white sport socks of the man in front of me on the cue to Aldi’s cashier, reminded me of you.
Even A Dog In Babylon is Free (18 minutes, 2023)
In a letter written in the 7th century BC by the Babylonians to the Assyrian king Essarhaddon, the Babylonians defend the rights of foreigners in their city and call on the Assyrian king to afford them the same privileges they receive as Babylonians. They write that “even a dog, when entering the gates of Babylon, shall be protected.”
L'amour Sauvage (2014, 25 mins)
Lost love, lost artistic collaboration, the two are meeting for one night as she briefly visits the city where he still lives.
FILMMAKER BIO
Lior Shamriz is a film director, visual artist, and musician based in Oakland, California. Their films are essayistic narrations that utilize cinema as performance and the cinematic languages as a process of reflexive documentation. Through their cinema, multi-screens installation, music and participatory performance, they explore and question ideas about society, being and the bodyShamriz presented their films at numerous festivals and venues including Berlinale, Locarno IFF, Sarajevo IFF, BAFICI, Frameline San Francisco, MMCA Seoul, MoMA NYC, Washington DC National Gallery, and the National Gallery Victoria. Their work won multiple awards at Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage, and received retrospective at the Thessaloniki IFF, Katowice Ars Independent, SteakCinema Seoul and the Berlin Art Film Festival. In 2023, Shamriz launched Mimesis Magazine - Film as Performance, coedited with Elbe Trakal and Neha Choksi. Their writing appeared in the Journal for New Zealand & Pacific Studies, MoMA’s Dirty Looks reader, Pacific Arts Journal, and Mimesis Magazine. Shamriz is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz.