Etgar Keret - Cannes Film Festival Award-winning Director - Author of “Fly Already”, “Suddenly a Knock on the Door”

Author, Screenwriter, and Director Etgar Keret is a recipient of the French Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, the Charles Bronfman Prize, and the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Jellyfish, which he directed with his wife Shira Geffen. Most recently, they created the TV mini series The Middleman (L’Agent Immobilier) starring Mathieu Amalric. His books include the short story collections Fly Already, Suddenly a Knock on the Door, and his memoir The Seven Good Years. Etgar’s work has been translated into forty-five languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review,The New York Times, and This American Life.
A frequent collaborator with visual and performing artists, an exhibition inspired by his mother called Inside Out is currently showing at the Jewish Museum in Berlin until February 5th, 2023.

"For me, there is something about art, it's not a monologue, it's a dialogue. Some people, it doesn't matter who they speak to, they will speak in the same way they would speak to a five-year-old or to an intellectual or to somebody who doesn't speak the language very well. They would speak the same way and they don't care because this is what they have to say, but I think that the natural thing in the dialogue is really to look into the eyes of the person you speak to and see when he understands or when she doesn't understand or when she's moved or when he's angry. And basically out of that, kind of create your own language. And I think the same way that people are excited about learning and speaking different languages - because I think each language has different merits and different aspects.

Because my mom grew up in a period where they were excited about Nazi ideology and my mom knew this wasn't a good thing. So this idea of making up your own story instead of taking other people's stories was something that was very important. When I was a child, my mother didn't allow children's books in our home because she insisted on making up the stories for us. For her, basically, it was like the idea of reading us classics from a book was like ordering a pizza instead of cooking dinner. It meant that she didn't care about us. And she felt that because her parents told her bedtime stories in the ghetto where they had no access to books. And she saw how those people who were broken and angry and hurting could still find in their imaginations a brand new story that they made for somebody that they loved. So for her, it was this kind of generosity and something that could not be compared to, for example, buying Alice in Wonderland and reading it to somebody. You had to give more than that."

www.etgarkeret.com
The Middleman www.imdb.com/title/tt11523800
www.jmberlin.de/en/exhibition-inside-out-etgar-keret
https://etgarkeret.substack.com
Jellyfish http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0807721

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Photo credit: Lielle Sand