Asmara Beraki Marek delivers a talk entitled, “The Film Artist’s Intuition: An Exploration of Cinematic Creativity.”
Asmara Beraki Marek is an American film director, producer and script writer currently based in Prague. She’s shot a number of award-winning short films that have screened around the globe. Interspersed with clips of her work, her talk will center around the process behind creating film stories and the decisions an artist makes while shooting an auteur film. Ms. Marek is the founder of the Prague-based production company, Cinema Belongs To Us, s.r.o., is writing a Ph.D. thesis on film creation at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, and lectures on short film directing at The Film Academy of Prague (FAMU). She’s received grants for films from the Goethe Institute, The D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Czech Television and many others. She’s currently preparing her feature debut entitled, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman.”
a trailer for Marek’s company:
"Anywhere Else"
Translation of Karel Och’s review of KDEKOLI JINDE (Anywhere Else) FAMU Department of Directing “Karel Och: Comments on the Graduate Thesis Screening” – November 2012
“I think, that it would be a dream of every father to have a daughter that expressed her feeling for him by means of such a strong film,” praised a pedagogue (Petr Nikolaev) at the end of the screening of
Asmara Beraki’s graduate thesis film, ANYWHERE ELSE. An intimately tuned three-‐quarters of an hour clings to the side of college-‐educated taxi driver Tesfai, a naturalized Washingtonian originally from Ethiopia, who takes care of his two adolescent children during the temporary absence of his wife. This is the work of a filmmaker who already convinced of an extraordinary talent with the three year’s old bachelor’s short film, THE TOUR GUIDE. Both films are supported by a quality script whose characters, despite the limited space, are presented in an agile and complex way. We recognize the refined Tesfai as a caring and understanding ex-‐husband who is resistant to stress. He is not indifferent to the Czech Sofia, who went to the American metropolis to study language and gain experience. The characters “rotate” around Tesfai, have their own identity, nevertheless they do not occupy the space of the man with the peaceful smile. The daughter Faven, who looks up to her father, meets a young man who shows interest in her; meanwhile the rebellious age of Emmanuel doesn’t undermine the deep feelings Tesfai has for his son. The perceptive and adaptable Sofia rather quickly fits into the taxi-‐driver’s family, whose members on the basis of either personal or vicarious experience realize how important it is to help your neighbor if you find yourself in a foreign country.
Great promise and hope for the future is the fact that even in this early stage of her career Asmara Beraki has the individual components of film phrasing under non-‐violent, yet masterful control. How it is a fallen introduction that this seemingly certain requirement of a film director, unfortunately, all too often misses the reality. Beraki, however, shows that humility and self-‐confidence need not contradict. A focused civilian drama, one could say a fiction film with documentary elements, or a docu-‐fiction, introduces a young author as a person with a gift for empathy and the ability “to subjugate” discrete scenes, so they would have their own charisma and logic and at the same time function as an organic component of the whole.
The author is the artistic director of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
