biography

I was born in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan (USSR) in 1983. That, at least, is written in my Israeli passport.
Memory is a strange thing, I don't remember anything from being born, altho the impression must have been quite overwhelming. Instead I remember a useless moment of falling asleep in a warm back-seat of a car, blue “Jeguli” I think, driving from Tashkent to Alma-Ata. What were my parents doing in that Tashkent (a city I can't visualize at all) I have no idea. But I remember that the car was driving precisely between these two locations and that it was hot, sticky and sleepy. Thats my very first memory.
From this moment on all of my memories are formed from those flashes in which I'm moving from one place to another. When I was 5 my parents moved from Kazakhstan to Israel. On the airplane someone gave me the first chewing gum I have ever seen, he said it was Israeli. It had big XXX letters printed on the package. When I was 12 we moved to another town and I was mad at my parents for separating me from my friends. But I must have assimilated moving into my system because later following my own decisions I moved from class to class and from school to school all of the time, until the government intervened and sent me to travel from unit to unit in the army.
When I finished the military I tried to work in a few jobs but just when they started getting used to me I moved to Spain. In Madrid I spent the first 14 hours walking around the city, looking for a hostel that wouldn't be booked out, or just a bench to sit on. But I found none. For me, Madrid was like an elderly woman who never loved me, for some time she let me stay beside her, a cute unexperienced boy. I studied photography. It seemed like good work for someone who can’t stay in one place for too long. I even found an israeli journal dedicated to travel that was paying me for some reports from different european states. I learned to hate airports.
All the places where the journal was sending me looked alike, quite like Madrid. Same shops, same clothes, same facial expressions. I started believing that all Europe would look this way, one big country... And Suddenly I saw Naples.
I spent the first two days and the night between them walking the streets. I was not looking for hotels I was just looking around me. It seemed as if time did not exist inside these walls since the early Greeks. Sure there were the usual signs of progress (these smart phones and plasma tv's that people in every single country consider as a reason for their national pride). But in Napoli all of that didn't matter. People seemed to be living in a different space.
I quit my job and my studies and moved to Naples. I didn't have a clear idea what to do there, so I started a photography project that I dropped after a few months, since the camera just couldn't catch what I saw all around me. I’ve started blaming my camera, my hands, and the whole medium of photography of being impotent and not capable of capturing the proof of me being in a mysterious-land.
Also today I see Naples as a fusion of paradoxes. It's poverty doesn't shed tears but bitterly jokes of itself (like the omni-present Neapolitan barkeeper that upon hearing you want your coffee bitter happily murmurs: “like life then?”). Its famous violent criminality unexplainably maintains a contradicted sense of justice (In one instance, an armed bandit, on the way to his bike after having robbed my friends phone, suddenly turned around and apologizing, gave him back his sim card, blaming his distraction on being overworked). The photo-camera just wouldn't see any of those. I started writing, but I was never a skilled enough writer. Since I was often changing languages I’ve lost the connection that a writer must have with his mother-tongue. Or maybe being a photographer and a painter's son never allowed me to learn to use my imagination in any way but visually. At that point I first thought of cinema as a potential method of self-expression.
Few weeks later I was admitted to a film-school. It was the first time I didn't mind studying. During the second year I shot my first short film. It was accepted in the main concourse of the Naples Film Festival a fact that made me doubt the festival system right from the start. The movie was not all and all good, and it must have been taken as part of an agreement with the school. My father experiences proved the point. Clearly festivals tend to care way more about connections and agreements then autonomy of taste and appreciation of originality in art.
Later, I was involved in a few documentary projects that brought me to live with Bedouins in the Negev desert, and to spend weeks in the Russian forests. However, I couldn't find a new city of choice. Nothing would replace Napoli and I was always coming back. Once, on the way to one of my jobs I had to spend few days in Berlin. That was romance from the first moment.
A no-mans land where each one can be what he wants. Where a lonely graduated student without money without a single contact or protector in the cinema world, can film and produce four short films in one year. I was euphoric.
Yet every relationship, must have a time of disillusions and doubts. Such moment of delusions and doubts with Berlin I describe in the feature film Der Typ ist weg, released under the tittle Neukolln Wind by Basis Film distribution, on the 6th of January 2016 in Berlin. Following 4 years of work on the project. The movie had a good reception yet it screened mostly in alternative or "arthouse" cinemas of Berlin and Hamburg and stayed as it was in the true underground of the cinema world.
The screenplay Lalo on which I'm working now is a very naked story of Art and Prostitution in the bohemian scene of todays Berlin. The script is expected to be finished by the end of 2016.