Roee Rosen
Directing
Biography
Roee ROSEN (1963, Israel) is an artist, filmmaker, writer and lecturer. He was educated at the art academy in New York. Rosen’s work is known for his multilayered and provocative work which often challenges the divides between history and the present, documentary and fiction, politics and erotica. Rosen dedicated years to his fictive feminine persona, the Jewish-Belgian Surrealist painter and pornographer Justine Frank, a project that entailed fabricating her entire oeuvre as a book and a short film, Two Women and a Man (2005). His installation Live and Die as Eva Braun (1995-1997), about the Holocaust, developed from a scandal into a groundbreaking work. Rosen’s short film Out (2010) was awarded the Orizzonti Award at the 67th Venice Film Festival. His latest film is a musical comedy combining fiction, animation and documentary element, entitled Kafka for Kids (Tiger Competition IFFR 2022).
Known For
Basically, Kafka’s Metamorphosis is unfilmable. After all, the author didn’t want visual representations to appear of the insect Gregor Samsa turned into; readers should visualise that themselves.
Kafka for Kids
Hilarious is set to examine the possibility of dysfunctional humor and laughter stirred when there is no reason to laugh. Hilarious presents a stand up monologue of a female comedian performing live in front of a studio audience. If humor is a mechanism set to cope in particular ways with disturbing, sometimes forbidden topics, this performance not only offsets these structures through their failure, but also offers a different manifestation of these topics, left exposed without the guise of laughter.
Hilarious
In this monologue a legal theorist sets out to tackle the ways in which the Israeli military law in the occupied territories tackles the problems of circumscribing, defining, judging and punishing Palestinian children. The approach she tries is to imagine a listener removed in time and space. Her speech, however, lapses into musings on aging, illness and sexuality. A different cut of the monologue will be a part of a longer film entitled Kafka for Kids, but it can be experienced as an autonomous work.
Explaining the Law to Kwame
Out presents a domination/ submission scene set in a mundane living room. The increasing pain prompts the sub to spew out not only cries of pleasure and pain, but also sentences. The scene thus connotes both confessions under torture, and rituals of exorcism. The utterances of the demon who speaks through the sub are all quotes of Avigdor Lieberman, one of the most extreme right wing politicians in Israel. The ritual is framed by two scenes. A preceding interview with the two participants seems at the beginning to be a straightforward documentary, but transforms into an exposition of the narrative premise by which one is possessed, the other an exorcist. The final musical scene is a song set to the words of the Russian poet Esenin’s Letter to Mother. Executed as a one-shot, the song is a direct, if twisted, homage to the final scene of another film that deals with radical sexuality and politics: Dusan Makavejev’s WR, The Mystery of the Organism.
Out
No description available.
Gagging During Confession: Names and Arms
Truth or daring under the fictive gaze of Maxim Komar-Myshkin with unexpected allusions to Morphy Richards and the household iron, comes a black magical omnibus of posturing and illusion from a dysfunctional band of Soviet émigrés. Their hatred is democratic, their hatred is universal.
The Buried Alive Videos
At the beginning of Confessions Roee Rosen declares that now that he is about to die, he disavows a career replete with lies, scandals, and fake identities. and joins the confessional tradition that leads from St. Augustine to American TV. These confessions, however, are delivered by female surrogates - Roee Rosen 1, 2 and 3 - three illegal foreign workers residing in Israel. They deliver the monologues in Hebrew, a language they do not speak, by reading a transliteration of the text to Latin letters from a teleprompter. Marks on the teleprompter scroll indicated to the performers to occasionally mimic the body movements and facial expressions of the real Roee Rosen, at the other side of the camera. The text is built as a hybrid: on the one hand, it offers a rather dubious account of my own "crimes," but on the other hand, it is partially plausible as a monologue of a foreign worker.
The Confessions of Roee Rosen
The Dust Channel is a cultural exquisite corpse: an operetta with a libretto in Russian about a British home appliance, a Dyson DC07 Vacuum Cleaner, set in an Israeli reality of private perversion and socio-political phobias. While each of these layers offers its own resonances and substrata, they share communal and individual forms of xenophobia from within the private sphere of leisure and pleasure, abundance and perversions.
The Dust Channel
Justine Frank was a Jewish Belgian painter and writer close to the Surrealists — an artist the world truly needed. Roee Rosen found her. He was also, via the mysterious Johanna Führer-Ha’sfari, involved with the translation of Frank’s magnum opus, Sueur douce (Sweet Sweat).
Two Women and a Man
No description available.
I Was Called Kuney-Lemel
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Confessions Coming Soon
No description available.