Sheffield Fringe

Daniel Mann

Daniel Mann (b. 1984) is an Israeli filmmaker. His debut feature film ‘The Birdman’ was completed in early 2014. His second feature film “LOW TIDE” was developed at the Binger Directors lab 2011, selected to Cinemart 2013 and awarded for production. His films and video installations were exhibited in venues including IDFA, Rotterdam Film Festival, Contemporary Center of Art in Tel Aviv, Museum of Digital Art in Holon and Petah Tikva Museum.

Complex

Complex | Daniel Mann and Sirah Foighel Brutmann & Eitan Efrat | Israel 2008 | Video | 9 min

On a rainy night, a group of young men slowly assemble in a dark parking lot. One by one they appear, greeted by a mutual hug, invoking the intimacy they once shared during their three-year service at the IDF ‘special forces’. Soon, their attention shifts to the concrete lot, where they find a sketch outlining the walls and niches of a contingent building. Equipped with cardboard cylinders to be held as guns, they are requested to “takeover” the ‘house’ with the techniques they exercised so thoroughly during their service. Resuming their combat positions, they meticulously plan the ‘raid’ before going into action.

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Future Diaries

Future Diaries | Israel 2011 | Hi-8 to DV | 45 min 23s

Future Diaries consists entirely of Hi-8 videos shot by the artist’s father – predominantly during the family’s international travels. The opening sequence states: “In the future, Israel will declare a state of emergency,” and from there on in, the narrator describes a possibly post-apocalyptic scenario, superimposed onto the narrative framework of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Occasionally dipping into the novel itself, the narrative distorts the boundary between the actual, the self-constructed, and the fictive. The positions of privilege evident in both Mann’s family footage and Robinson Crusoe are ambiguously equated, drawing uncomfortable but inevitable parallels between the political problems of the past and the present.

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