Miri Nishri
Israeli videomaker
participant in
VIP – VideoChannel Interview
CologneOFF IV – Here We Are!
4th edittion of Cologne Online Film Festival 2008 – OFF program/LAB program series
SFC – Shoah Film Collection
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Video title:
Troubled Water
2007, 12:00
Gita, 85 years old, is to be uprooted from her home in the kibbutz and forced into a nursing home. As her consciousness crumbles, personal memories of escape, loss and persecution mix with current realities shown on television.
Her traumatic holocaust experiences, and the yearn for a lost loved one intertwine with the current catastrophe of a wife of a fireman killed on 9/11, to form a nightmarish reality – a frozen time trap continuously tightening, intensified by the fear of the nursing home.
The unification of these moments in time seeps into her daughter, creator of this work, who is condemned to perceive reality in the same way.
Troubling nightmares absorbed from her mother accompanied her childhood dreams, and are now shot at her from the television screen in the form of a trapped Palestinian girl.
Troubled water speaks of various events, spread over different eras and continents, and how these past and contemparary global events become local and personal experiences through today’s media.
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Video title:
Who is Miri Nishri?
2008, 14:00
The movie begins with a question – who is Miri Nishri? This question will continue to haunt us as the mystery unravels but is never to be resolved. Many characters puzzled by this enigma are looking at us from the screen with various answers, only more puzzling.
Some of them claim that they were Miri Nishri for a while, others give vague details of the life and identity of a woman of that name as fuzzy memories of a long forgotten meeting or relation. Miri is an entity build from random associations and shreds of being and identities who seldom add up.
Miri Nishri is revealed as an elusive entity – the sum and quotient of different identities: homeless, whore, artist, elderly child or fertile mother, Jewish saint or orthodox Christian. The clichés of the collective identity shatter on the walls of an individual one who knows no boundaries of the flesh, and is wandering from body to body. Throughout the movie a baby will surface, his fate uncertain – maybe abandoned, dead or resurrected.
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