Headshots
Austria, Germany, 2010, 35 mm, 91’
directed by Lawrence Tooley
screenplay Lawrence Tooley, Loretta Pflaum fotografija/cinematography Emre Erkmen
music Lorenz Dangel
sound Daniel Iribarren
editing Lawrence Tooley
cast Loretta Pflaum, Samuel Finzi, Laura Tonke, Jeremy Xido, Marcus Schleinzer, Karl-Heinz Hackl, Almut Zilcher, Pascale Schiller
producer Lawrence Tooley
production AskimAskim Film, T +49 30 612 882 55, E info@askimaskimfilm.com
world sales Insomnia World Sales, T +33 (0) 143 580 804, E luc@insomnia-sales.com
I first met Laurence a few years ago at the Viennale, where Hartmut Bitomsky presented a program in honor of the dffb, its 40th anniversary. The majority of films selected were of very recent vintage, i.e., made (give or take) during Bitomsky’s time as dean of the FRG’s oldest film school. One of them was an early exercise by Laurence – good stuff, fine eye, great sense of rhythm. Laurence also happened to be among the few guests there besides Bitomsky, and as the old master and I knew each other and talked a lot, and as Laurence was often around, the man from Texas and I also started to talk, which was good.
Headshots, now, had its world premiere the last Viennale – I don't know why other, officially more important festivals thought they could do without it, looking at the kind of bullshit they screened instead. Anyway, I didn't make it to any of the screenings there, and caught up with it only in Rotterdam. And I was, to say the least, mighty surprised: Headshots is certainly something different from the film before, which was decidedly different again from the one before that... Read: Laurence is an adventurer, explorer, researcher, someone who wants to try something different with each film – a rare bird indeed in these, our days, when most film students try to become a brand instead of an artist, let alone a human being.
Headshots plays like an echo from an era past: the times of Thomas Schultz, Wolfgang Schmidt, Irina Hoppe, Michel Freerix, Christoph Willems, Matl Findel...the late 80s, early 90s, the Wendezeit...when a cinema was cultivated at the dffb that considered realism as an art of the possible. The world asks to be changed, and you could do that by putting a woman in front of the city’s skyline at dusk and look at her in that certain way and there was cinema and everything suddenly different. Headshots is all about freedom in the way it moves, develops in ways that refuse to add up in any conventional sense; and it’s about a woman in search of one word’s essence: choice.
Olaf Möller. Born Cologne. Writes about and shows films. Ferronian brigade.
Kino Otok Programme Advisor
Lawrence Tooley
Born in Shiner, Texas. Studied philosophy and communication at university. Fulbright scholarship to Hamburg, Germany. Studied at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg in 2000. Exhibitions of video art and photography at various galleries. Worked as a film editor, writer, and commissioning editor in various capacities while studying film direction at the German Academy of TV & Film in Berlin. Headshots is his debut feature film.
