Jürgen Vsych
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Jürgen Vsych (pronounced Yurgen VY-zick), born in 1966, is the writer-director-producer of 30 films, including Son for Sail, Ophelia Learns to Swim, Tyrannosaurus Tex, and Pay Your Rent, Beethoven, which won the Prince Charles Trust Award. Her films have been shown in forty film festivals in thirty countries. Vsych's journal was included in the book "World Cinema: Diary of a Day". She also wrote, directed, produced and starred in 38 plays and 110 one-act plays. She has written a feature-length screenplay of "Pay Your Rent, Beethoven", as well as five other feature comedies. Her film company is called Wroughten Films.
Vsych is the author of the first autobiography of an American female film director, The Woman Director. Vsych served as Ralph Nader's 2004 presidential campaign photographer and videographer. She is writing a book describing how she wrote and directed the film, Ralph Nader Crashes the Two Parties, a mock debate in which Nader - who was excluded from the official presidential debates - debates George W. Bush and John Kerry, using Bush and Kerry's words from the presidential debates and employing GI Joe dolls as stand-ins for the candidates.
Vsych holds the distinction of having one of the longest careers of any female film director in cinema history, and shows no sign of slowing down. Her nickname is "Rommel," after Erwin Rommel, aka "The Desert Fox," the brilliant, chivalrous World War II Field Marshal who turned against Adolf Hitler.
Contents |
[edit] The Woman Director
The Woman Director: The Adventures of a Really Independent Filmmaker Ages 6-36 by Jürgen Vsych, is the first autobiography of an American female film director. It is only the third memoir ever written by a woman director (the other two are by Alice Guy Blache and Leni Riefenstahl), and it is the first written in English. The book is also one of the few memoirs written in the present tense. It is based on Vsych's 17,256-paged diary.
The Woman Director is a comic tale of an independent filmmaker who went from making one-minute Super-8 films financed with baby-sitting money and edited with her father's toenail clippers, to writing, directing & producing the 35mm feature Ophelia Learns to Swim.
[edit] Filmography (incomplete)
[edit] Writer-Director-Producer
- Ralph Nader Crashes the Two Parties (2004)
- Ophelia Learns to Swim" (2001)
- Son for Sail (1994)
- Pay Your Rent, Beethoven (1992) Winner The Prince's Trust Award
- "The Music Scholarship (1989)
- "Tyrannosaurus Tex"" (1974)
- "Go To Your Tomb, Young Lady" (1973)
- "The Rocks Go On A Picnic" (1973)
[edit] Bibliography
- The Woman Director] (2005) autobiography, ISBN 0974987905
[edit] Quotations
- "My only talent, if you can call it a talent, is whenever I smell a rat, I hunt it down, take a photo of it, or make a film or write a book about it and announce to the world, 'I think this is a rat - what do you think?'”
- "I didn’t get why Ralph Nader was so hung up on fighting corporations. Why didn’t he take on some really influential swamp - like Hollywood? It has worldwide influence, kills a lot of its workers and hurts consumers."
- "I'm a director...but what I REALLY want to do is play bagpipes!"
- "Soon, only films set in biblical times will be free from wall-to-wall product placement - and perhaps not even then - 'Hey, Jesus, let me wipe your brow with Veronica’s Egyptian cotton towel from Bed, Bath & Beyond - it absorbs perspiration and blackheads!'”
- "Why do we still have this antiquated Electoral College? Why don’t we all drive solar-powered cars? Why aren’t we on the metric system? Why is George W. Bush president? Don’t ask me - I just live here!"
- "We can put a man on the moon...but we can't put a woman on the moon."
- "Girls can do anything boys can - but they won't get to."
- "My greatest hope is that, at the end of my life, there will be so many women directors that when l write my final autobiography, I will be able to title it, 'Just Another Woman Director.'"
