Deniz Demirer

Deniz Demirer, a Polish-born filmmaker, has been making films for over a decade—first as actor, then as cinematographer, and now as writer and director. His unusual blend of intimacy and hardscrabble urban existence has never yielded the stories we expect. Demirer’s filmography incudes five feature films as writer and director including Nocturnal Jake (2009), Not I (2010), American Mongrel (2014), Ezer Kenegdo (2016) and Chinaroom (2016). His work as a filmmaker and actor has been exhibited at the Mill Valley Film Festival, Portland Film Festival, Maryland Film Festival, Moscow International Film Festival, Varna International Film Festival, Syracuse International Film Festival, among many others. Recently, Demirer was cinematographer on the award-winning short film Forest Born. His films have explored such subjects as exile and self-destruction, often with an eye toward the fragility that these conditions can reveal within human relations. Demirer seeks to establish verisimilitude by means of an immediate relationship between audience and story. Dialog is often improvised and situations are frequently presented in medias res without the pre-formulated fanfare and plot exposition that typically introduce scenes and events in Hollywood movies. Deniz Demirer completed his tenure as artist-in-residence at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture in New York City earlier in the year and recently played a small supporting role in Woody Allen's new film, "A Rainy Day in New York." He is currently developing his sixth feature film.