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FUJIFILM MOTION PICTURE •
THEMESOF IDENTITY
ANINTERVIEWWITH
NATASHABRAIER
he cross cultural theme of her Tlatest film, The Infidel, is an
apt summary of Natasha Braier’s career to date. The Argentine-born graduate of
the National Film & Television School in Beaconsfield has accumulated wide experience working on diverse projects all over the world, yet the theme that recurs most consistently is that of identity.
“Totally,” she affirms, “and I think what was interesting for me when I took this film. But most of the films that I’ve done in the past are the total opposite to this; they are personal, art house films where the director is also the writer. They’re very personal stories.”
Those past credits she refers to include a slew of shorts, and features including XXY, Glue, In The City of Sylvia, Shane Meadows’ Somers Town and Claudia Llosa’s Berlin Golden Bear-winning The Milk of Sorrow.
By contrast, The Infidel was written by David Baddiel for his friend and fellow comedian Omid Djalili and tells of the cross-cultural confusion when a man raised Muslim discovers he was born Jewish. This is the cue for a
Photo main: Natasha Braier on set
retrospective education in his previously unsuspected heritage, with American born cabbie Lenny (Richard Schiff) as his guide.
Given her more dramatic taste in movies, the prospect of working with two of British comedy’s brightest stars was not an issue for Braier; “I don’t have a television,” she says, “I didn’t know who they were.” The main attraction was director Josh Appignanesi.
“Josh did a film called Song Of Songs,” Braier explains, “a very dark, art house film about incest in an Orthodox Jewish family. It was very well received at film festivals and totally the opposite of this comedy we were doing. When he first approached me I wondered why he was doing this.
“But we had some really interesting conversations about what he wanted to do with the mise-en-scene and the shooting multiple scenes in one shot, in the style of Woody Allen’s Manhattan. I thought that was really exciting and thought I really wanted to make this film because I would be playing with all these elements with somebody that I recognised had a huge talent.”
THE MAGAZINE • EXPOSURE • 25
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