Etgar Keret
Etgar Keret's favorite radio show, "This American Life", features his story "Lieland" in this week's podcast of the show. "Lieland" is one of the stories available for free download only this week (starting next week, please ignore this sentence :) ).
Audio interview with Keret at Christofer Lydon's "Open Source Radio" (Brown university).
"Wristcutters" was released as DVD in the UK.
IndieLondon reviews the movie
Based on the short story Kneller’s Happy Campers by Etgar Keret and co-written by Dukic, the film effortlessly rises above its potentially depressing premise to provide film fans with a genuinely inventive ride. Characters are richly drawn and more than a little quirky (no one is able to smile) but it’s easy to warm to their heartache and turmoil.
Visually, Jellyfish, which won the 2007 Camera d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, is subtly surreal, full of grace and a gentle loopiness. A photograph of a seaside ice cream vendor suddenly takes on a life of its own; an airplane arcing across the sky reappears, like a toy's shadow, on the wall of a hospital room.Around Philly
The film’s simple, poetic script ... as well as gorgeous imagery ... surreal production of Hamlet that amuses ... offbeat wedding photography, and other lovely touches that shows off the filmmakers’ creativity. Beautifully conceived, written and performed, this is one of the year’s best films
Constant Reader ("The Stranger", Seatle):
In his most recent book to be translated to English, The Girl on the Fridge, there are almost 50 stories packed into 171 pages, but this isn't the typical, unsatisfying flash fiction; in stories of three pages or less, Keret unveils little universes of weirdness and sorrow, but unlike, say, Carver's stories, they don't feel like they were written 30 years ago.
NY Times reviews "the girl on the fridge"
“And Michal — she’s the prettiest girl in the school, probably — came by and she said we were all disgusting and like animals, and I barfed but not because of her.” Keret often punctuates his stories with this type of upsetting but also vaguely funny ending. When these final sentences hit, they hit hard, like literary afterburners that push the stories deeper into your gut.
Etgar Keret is the winner of the 2008 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize for his imaginative and mischievous collection of short stories, Missing Kissinger (Chatto & Windus). The 41-year-old Israeli writer and film-maker triumphed over Tom Segev, Philip Davis and Philippe Grimbert, and wins £4,000
"The Girl on the Fridge" on Richard Rayner's shortlist (LA Times)
The prose zips, the effects unsettle -- Keret is himself something of a magician, and what he pulls from his hat feels lively indeed.
LA Weekly has published Keret's short story "Loquat"
I gave her the gun, but she slapped it right back into my hand. “That’s not kids, that’s animals,” she said resolutely.
“Okay, Grandma, I’ll take the rifle.” I gave in with a hopeless sigh and kissed her cheek. “Now go inside.”
“Oh, mon petit gendarme,” Grandma said, clapping her hands happily. Filled with satisfaction at her small victory, she skipped up the steps.
“Soldat,” I cried after her.
San Francisco Bay Times interviews Keret
I really think that when you write or make films, you try to show how you experience reality. I don’t experience it as realism, which is objective, and something people agree on. The moment you accept subjectiveness, it transcends realism - falling in love is like flying in the air. These experiences happen, and you check them against reality, and they are actually much more relevant than reality. It is a way to describe the world I live in.
Some "Jellyfish" reviews from LA and SF
LA Weekly
An Israeli movie with neither politics nor religion — and only one casual, if fraught, mention of the Holocaust — bespeaks an underlying desire for normality that’s as poignant and fantastic as Keret and Geffen’s modest, shabby Tel Aviv settings.LA Times
Like Keret's short stories, the film has a sense of the genial absurdity of life, a whimsical appreciation of the inescapable randomness of our anything-can-happen existence, of how fragile yet resilient are the bonds that draw people together.SF Gate
The kind of magical realism we see in the Israeli indie effort "Jellyfish" is a tricky business; if poorly handled, it's contrived and saccharine. This comedy-drama has whimsical moments, but through adroit direction it avoids these pitfalls. By the end it's clear that serious issues are in play.
Here are 2 interviews with Keret
LA Times
"My prime motivation to write stories," Keret said, "is that I want to read them. I would be very happy if somebody else had done it, but they're all lazy . . . , so I have to write it all by myself." As he tells it, his decision to direct "Jellyfish" was a similar story of picking up the slack from the goldbrickers out there.LA Weekly
"My wife wrote this wonderful script, and I said, 'I really want to see this film.' She showed it to one director who said it was never going to work. She showed it to another who said, 'This is boring.' The third one said, 'This is completely confused.' . . . The moment I suggested directing the film I looked at my wife's eye and knew if we didn't do it, this film will never be done."
“I write about the violence that I grew up with,” Keret says matter-of-factly. “In a country where, for three years out of their lives, everybody who is 18 lives in a reality where he may kill people or see people get killed next to him, he may do things Americans would never do. I didn’t serve in the occupied territories, but people who do know that if you knock on a door and it doesn’t open, you kick it open. You can play the guitar, read Nietzsche, become a very good dentist, but you’ll still do it. And once you cross that line, it’s very difficult to uncross it. When your girlfriend won’t talk to you and locks the door, you will still know how to kick it open.”
Heeb Magazine: Things Fall Apart
Though rooted in ordinary events—birthday parties, traffic jams—and told in straightforward, unadorned prose, the fantastic inevitably creeps in, leaving his stories with a strange foreboding. Such is the case in “Hat Trick,” in which an unwitting magician starts pulling severed rabbits and headless babies out of his hat to the delight of his underage audience; or “Crazy Glue,” in which a marital dispute is solved when the woman pastes herself to the ceiling with super glue. This surrealism, coupled with glib narration, belies how serious a writer Keret is and how dark his subject matter. This does not mean that the author’s bizarre scenes won’t make you laugh—they will—but just as often, that laughter will get stuck in your throat
Monsters and Critics Movie Review: Jellyfish (Meduzot)
A fresh look at the power of cinema to plump the depths of the sub conscious. This is not an easy film to watch. The audience has to work, but the result is worth it.
"The Girl on the Fridge" is out.
Here's a couple of reviews:
Village Voice
By his own metric, Keret (whose last collection was The Nimrod Flipout) is the raging asthmatic of short-fiction writers, his words chosen and few, his stories issued with the urgency of an inhaler's blast.San Diego Union-Tribune
Rarely are stories as economical as Keret's, and rarely are economical stories as affecting as these. Keret, an Israeli writer whose work has been featured on “This American Life” and “Selected Shorts,” explores the nature of violence and alienation from a surreal, whimsical perspective in writings that rarely exceeds five pages in length. Even the most impatient reader has time for these quick reads.
Entertaiment Weekly: Jellyfish (2008)
Marvelously inventive, often-ironic Israeli storyteller Etgar Keret and his life- and workmate, Shira Geffen, spin in Jellyfish a dreamy, arty, alluringly cockeyed tale involving three unrelated women in Tel Aviv, a mysterious little girl, and the power of the sea — an element central to Tel Aviv life and psyche. The seemingly random movement of the title's slippery, stinging creatures applies to the direction of the characters' lives, as well as to the delicate, carefully crafted shape of the movie, which won the Camera d'Or at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. B+
NY Times (Critics' Pick):
This is a movie about the gulf between parents and children, between lovers, between friends and even between adults and the children they wish they could still be.
But it is also about the irreducible oddness of being alive, and the tiny pleasures and kindnesses that can compensate for the usual tedium and indifference of the world.
New York Magazine(Critics' pick)
This award-winning drama traces the paths of intersecting lives in Tel Aviv: a groom and his bride, an aimless young woman and a mysterious child, a Filipino caregiver and her cranky charge. The film is shot through with keen observations and dry wit, and has a refreshing, easygoing sense of flow. — Logan Hill
Bleakly wistful, regarding its essentially lonely characters with a gaze both tender and lethal, Jellyfish was co-directed by the bestselling Israeli writer Etgar Keret and his wife, dramatist-director Shira Geffen (who is credited with the screenplay)
4th of April "Jellyfish" starts screening commercially in the USA. Find a theater near you
The life aquatic — in Israel By KAORI SHOJI, Japan Times
War and its implications are the first things one tends to associate with Israeli cinema, perhaps because those kind of films are the ones that make it to the film festivals and get international releases (most notable are the works of director Amos Gitai). "Jellyfish" is a welcome respite from this
AWARDS AT 9th IFF BRATISLAVA 2007:
Special Mention of the Jury - Jellyfish / Meduzot
(d. Etgar Keret, Shira Geffen, Israel, France, 2007)
There is great humanity in these short stories which are woven into a poetic image with questions and no answers.
Prize of the Ecumenical Jury - Jellyfish / Meduzot
(d. Etgar Keret, Shira Geffen, Israel, France, 2007)
For the poetic and symbolic reconciliation with others and themselves of individuals facing existential torments.
LA Weekly - Short Story: Freeze!
Suddenly I could do it. I’d say “Freeze!” and everyone would freeze, just like that, in the middle of the street ... And I’d walk past them till I found the prettiest girls... bring them home and fuck their brains out ... I felt fantastic. I felt like a king. Until my mother butted in ...
ILLUSTRATION:
Deanna Staffo
La Weekly Art/Books - An Exclusive story by Etgar Keret:
I was knocking down a wall
All women reporters are whores
and I was knocking down a wall...
Translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverstone
Meduzot / Les Méduses wins Camera d'Or prize at the Cannes
Indiewire:
Expressing excitement at winning their Camera d'Or prize for best first feature, Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen called the experience "a dream." The directing duo also won the SACD prize in the festival's International Critics Week section. Playwright, theater director and actress Geffen summed up the excitement in Cannes Sunday, "It's like a dream...like in a movie."
