Israeli artist Keren Cytter (born 1977 in Tel Aviv, lives and works in Amsterdam) tells stories. She does so through experimental movies that draw on a variety of exciting genres, ranging from film noir via fictitious documentaries through to pure cinema verité. She tells short stories in which the everyday collides with the mysterious.
Keren Cytter also tells quite normal but absurd short stories that tread a thin line between the comical, the grotesque and the tragic while also functioning as a commentary on the medium of film. Her films document her surroundings, her friends and family, who act like characters in a kind of dreamworld in which egocentric goals, profound frustrations, personal aspirations and intimate wishes are the content – usually they bring to mind the unnatural amateurish depictions at theater castings.
Cytter deconstructs traditional narrative structures by superimposing video clips with non-harmonized voice and sound sequences that are often doubled up with subtitles, and in this way conjures up an often surprising and always arbitrary reality. Her films arise from image/voice collages that are based on real and fictitious events as well as from autobiographical material. The films possess a special attraction which is expressed through the inner, psychological tension of the actors. They often personify youth, insecure and tormented by existential angst, which through their geographical and cultural displacement find themelves in constant unease with themselves and their environment.
