DIRECTOR & AUTHOR: MIRON ZOWNIR

Stanley Kubrick’s script author Terry Southern called Miron Zownir “The poet of radical photography”. Born in Karlsruhe in 1953, he moved to Berlin in 1976 and then went to the USA in 1981, where he spent 15 years in New York, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh.

“Zownir is one of the greatest existentialist photographers of our time. His images are icons of lust, pain, hunger, madness, starvation and death.” (Review of Radical Eye – The Photography of Miron Zownir, Die Gestalten Verlag Berlin, 1997).

During his time in America, he also directed several short underground films; some of them were made in collaboration with Alexandre Rockwell (In The Soup), Ruy Murakami (Tokyo Decadence) and his producer Chosei Funahara (Enemy). With his award winning short movie against racism Skinhead lane (35mm, 1993) Zownir announced himself to be back in Germany. In 1995 he went to Russia where he pictured the rapid social and moral decline of the former Soviet Union with shocking closeness. His documentary Bruno S - Estrangement is death on Bruno S., backyard musician, painter and main actor in Werner Herzog’s films The enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Stroszek was shown at the Berlinale 2003 and many other film festivals all over the world. In his first crime novel “Kein schlichter Abgang” published in 2003 (MirandA Verlag, Bremen) you can once again follow Miron Zownir protagonists into a vicious and hostile cosmos, which is to be discovered as an absurd summation of everyday- life-insanity.

Valuev vs. Violence (2006), a spot against violence with Russian Box- Heavyweight-Champ Nikolai Valuev reveals the socalled “Beast from the East“ as a thoughtful and sensitive sportsman.

Miron Zownir continues to work as photographer, script author, author of crime novels, director and once in a while as a lecturer at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie in Berlin.