Movies Swim Little Fish Swim | ||
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Occupation Film director, Screenwriter & Producer Similar Lola Bessis, Olivia Durling Costello, Dustin Guy Defa, Brooke Bloom, Myriam Ajar | ||
Ruben amar
Ruben Amar is a French multi-award movie screenwriter, director and producer. He is best known for the independent feature film Swim Little Fish Swim and his two last short films Checkpoint and A Girl Like You With a Boy Like Me.
Contents
- Ruben amar
- Checkpoint
- Critical reception
- Swim Little Fish Swim
- Style and influences
- Thirst Street
- Feature films
- Short films
- References
After attending business school and spending a few years within flourishing digital startups and television production companies, Ruben quickly returned to his first love: the cinema. This leads him to attend intensive filmmaking workshops in London.
Between 2007 and 2011, he directed several short films, shot in Paris, London, New York and on the Israeli-Palestinian border. These films appeared in more than 300 international festivals including Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam and South by Southwest (SXSW).
Checkpoint
Checkpoint, one of his last short film has premiered at Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in 2011 where it won the Youth Critic Award. The film tells the story of Suleiman, a young Palestinian boy living in the Gaza Strip who accompanies his father on monthly visits to the ruins of a destroyed village. Though Suleiman doesn’t understand his father’s ritual, he feels he has a duty to help him.
Checkpoint has been then exhibited worldwide in more than 100 international film festivals and have earned a long list of awards and screenings at prestigious festivals including like Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, Slamdance, Palm Springs International Film Festival, Raindance, Festival du cinéma méditerranéen de Montpellier. Checkpoint has been also broadcast by many international TV channels (TPS, BeTV, Canal+ Poland, RTBF).
Critical reception
Swim Little Fish Swim
A year later, following the success of Checkpoint, Ruben Amar started co-writing, co-directing and co-producing with Lola Bessis what will become their first feature film: Swim Little Fish Swim.
Swim Little Fish Swim focuses on the domestic life of Leeward (Dustin Guy Defa) and Mary (Brooke Bloom), a young married couple at a crossroads. Mary is a hardworking nurse determined to turn the couple’s lives around while Leeward is a struggling marginal musician who fancies himself a misunderstood artist and New Age visionary. The two can’t even agree on what to name their three-year-old daughter. Enter Lilas (Lola Bessis), a 19-year-old French artist trying to make it in New York and escape the shadow of her famous painter mother. When the bubbly young woman moves into the couple’s tiny Chinatown apartment, their already fragile balance is upset even further.
This film was shot in New York on a shoe-string budget. Once finished, it quickly became a festival hit (Rotterdam; São Paulo; Jerusalem; Durban; CPH:PIX) after premiering at South By South West (SXSW) in 2013. Swim Little Fish Swim enjoyed a worldwide theatrical release and extensive media coverage in France and in the US and it has recently been sold to HBO Europe, Netflix, RTBF and OCS among other international networks.
Style and influences
"Inspired by New York filmmakers Jim Jarmusch, John Cassavetes and Spike Lee, and by their own experiences of the city, French filmmakers Ruben Amar and Lola Bessis have crafted a delightfully engrossing domestic drama for their feature debut." (Northwest Film Forum)"There are precedents for this kind of illusion-shattering realism - the film shares with Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World the need to prove how much damage some sense of ‘integrity’ can inflict on other people, and even with The Catcher in the Rye the reminder that one person’s view of the world rarely coheres completely with the real thing. And in the constant hardships, disappointments, failures and dead-ends it deals out to its characters, who stick to their dreams to the point of alienating everyone close to them, it’s not unlike the more recent Inside Llewyn Davis, which also rendered artistic practice as a kind of masochism." (MTV) Swim Little Fish Swim is also "inspired by the Nouvelle Vague’s observations of human beings and Jacques Demy’s charming atmosphere." (The Red List)
"Swim Little Fish Swim has also echoes of Once, Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture and John Cassavetes’ Shadows. The result is a fresh, modern take on New York City’s vibrant world through the eyes of two talented emerging filmmakers." (SFJFF)
Critical reception
Thirst Street
Ruben Amar is also producing next Nathan Silver’s feature film, Thirst Street with his new production company PaperMoon Films.
Thirst Street is starring Lindsay Burdge, Damien Bonnard, Esther Garrel, Lola Bessis, Jacques Nolot, Françoise Lebrun. The Oscar-winning actress Anjelica Huston has come aboard as the voice-over narrator.
Synopsis: While on layover in Paris, a lonely American flight attendant has a rendezvous with a seedy nightclub bartender and becomes tangled in a web of miscommunication, masochism, and unrequited amour fou
Thirst Street will be premiering in US Narrative competition at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival.