Lisa Reich wins Ennesima Youth Mention 2017

From Cannes, where her short is nominated for Next Generation Short Tiger, Lisa Reich answered to our questions about Close, Ennesima Youth Mention 2017.

How the director Lisa is born?
In my school days, whenever I visited art class I always wanted to make films rather than do paintings. Fortunately my art teachers supported me on that matter and gave me the opportunity to work on movies for my grades, although it wasn’t really part of the lessons. In that time I fall in love with film-making. So after my graduation it was clear that I wanted to do it professionally.

 

How did you choose the setting to represent the story of your short Close?
We wanted to tell our story in just one scene. So very early in the progress we decided to use only one location: a large dance room. The room should also reflects the internal state  of our main characters. That’s why we arranged it a little bit messy and rough to show their confused emotional life. The size of the room should also make them feel a little bit lost in the spotlight.

 

There was a criteria to choose actors?
The casting was rather unusual to other project we had before. Because this time we not only needed good actors but also actors who could perform a professional modern dance choreography. Especially for the male part we didn’t had that much options, but Andrej was that good, so we didn’t need more castings.

 

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Did you find it difficult to convey and represent the idea you had in mind?
The special narrative structure of the film was most likely the biggest challenge. We decided to tell the two perspectives just with our visual concept, instead of explaining to many things in the dialogue. But luckily everybody in my team was very well prepared and together we managed to bring our ideas to the screen.

 

Do you have a important memory during the shoot?
Like I said before, in Close we show exactly the same situation in two different perspectives. Sometimes it was kind of confusing to shoot the same thing twice, but a little different and with lots of hours or even days in between.

 

LISA REICH THANKS YOUNG ENNESIMO FILM FESTIVAL JURY FOR CHOOSING HER MOVIE “CLOSE” FOR THE ENNESIMA YOUTH MENTION 2017