Louis Fried
Directing
Biography
Louis Fried was born in Munich, Germany. 2004- 2010 Studies of Visual Communication/ Film at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg. His work oscillates between documentary and fictional processes. In search of the strange in the familiar, the unexpected in the everyday, it combines precise observations with surreal moments to open up new spaces in between. His films have been screened at international film festivals such as the Berlinale, Jeonju Film Festival or Sao Paulo Short Film Festival and have also won awards. He lives and works in Hamburg
Known For
A person enters the frame dressed up as a bird. In a dressing room, John Malkovich sheds the costume of Casanova. A young woman's skirt is just as orange as the beak of a zebra finch singing in a cage. White lilies stand at the foot of a statue of the Virgin Mary, red roses in front of the window of an SM studio. There the quiet game of submission in exchange for money, in a museum an embrace, a poem whispered in the ear. Children playing in a forest in autumn. A forest in summer, framed by light. An orgasm and a dance.
Casanova Gene
Louis Fried goes in search of traces in the Hamburg district of Hammerbrook. An area in whose appearance war and Nazi rule are inscribed to this day. Between wasteland and reconstruction, memorials and urban planning, he encounters his own family history.
Hammerbrook Blues
The portrait of a building, a meditation, perhaps the invocation of its inherent spirit. Moreover, it is a reflection on labor in the near future.
Flexible Bodies
In biology, an organism is any individual entity that exhibits the properties of life. It is a synonym for life form. A life form travels across the universe and lands on this planet. Who it is, what it looks like, remains unclear. It could be many, it could be everywhere. Children, a meteorite, algae, fish, old women, the character Ophelia from Shakespeare's Hamlet or a computer program. Diary of an Organism is a footage film in various senses: made out of images found in Internet archives, of own images and text fragments, remnants of several former films never used, but always remembered. Different forms of collecting, archiving, remembering and organizing dehierarchically shape the films rhythm becoming a sensory impression, "gelatinous", like the jellyfish in it.
Diary of an Organism (newly translated)
A trip to South Korea, searching for memories from early childhood, spent there between the age of 1-3. Memories that barely exist. Layers of strangeness blend together: being a foreigner in the country and the strangeness vis-a-vis the past and the own biography. Wandering in the gaps, in between the noise and silences.