Excerpts from selected narrative works I directed.

Headshots

DE/AT 2010 92′ German and English

with Loretta Pflaum, Samuel Finzi, Pascale Schiller, Laura Tonke, Almut Zilcher, Vivian Bartsch, Jeremy Xido, Karlheinz Hackl, Markus Schleinzer, Marisa Growald, Mike Klammer, Margit Bendokat…

Trapped in the world of the “young creative class” in Berlin, where life is your career, love is sexual convenience, and happiness measured by degrees of cynical detachment, Marianne (Loretta Pflaum), a thirty-something photographer, begins to look at things anew after discovering that she is pregnant. Soon a hidden world of darkness and disorder, mistrust and lies breaks into the open. Told as a web of interlocking anecdotes, Headshots charts the course from fragile love to betrayal, from complicity to self-annihilation.

Headshots premiered at the International Film Fest Rotterdam in the 2011 Tiger Competition and later went to cinemas in Austria, Central and South America, and has been broadcast in several countries.

A delightful twisting together of introspective moments and dry comedy

haciendocine

selected reviews

Die Presse – Stefan Grissemann

The Austrian co-produced debut by Lawrence Tooley is a better milieu study of Berlin than Tom Tykwer’s Three. Loretta Pflaum is impressive as a photographer in an existential crisis…

artforum – Dennis Lim

…but the most interesting film by an American director was perhaps the very un-American Headshots,  a first feature by Texas-born German resident Lawrence Tooley, a flinty portrait of one woman’s psychic distress that gets to the heart of urban disaffection…

Cineropa
Boyd van Hoeij

Headshots, which was produced by the director for his German outfit AskimAskim Film, is many different films at once, and is almost as diverse as the city where it is set: Berlin….The narrative style of Tooley, who wrote the screenplay together with actress Pflaum, is neither very close to realism (though the performances are) and neither simply based on freewheeling associations. The scenes, with an exceptionally uncluttered mise-en-scene, unfold simply one after the other, as if there would be no different way to tell the story…Tooley not only directed, produced and co-wrote the film, but was also responsible for the production design and editing.

Haciendocine
Hermán Siseles

The highly cinematic, surprising debut by Lawrence Tooley created a stir at this year’s BAFICI festival. A delightful twisting together of introspective moments and dry comedy, the story orbits the realms of psychological pain and raw existential nihilism in a language that appears natural and alien at the same time…

Cinema Scope

by Olaf Möller

… 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.

Synchron Filmmagazin interview (in German):

–

Gatekeeper

Logline:
Things are never the same after Elly Brandl, a wealthy gallery owner in Vienna, decides to help out a young victim of human trafficking get back on his feet.

selected Reviews

Cineropa

Marina Richter

Gatekeeper, the second feature by Texan-born, Vienna-based filmmaker Lawrence Tooley, currently screening at the Diagonale in Austria, is a different take on human trafficking within European borders. On one hand, Gatekeeper is about a lesser-known form of human rights abuse – the profits made from cheap labour “imported” from poor EU member states to more prosperous countries. Without a shred of political commentary or wishing to become yet another feature on immigration issues, the film is more about the imbalance of power conditioned by individuals’ backgrounds and social status. Based on a script penned by Tooley and his co-author and lead actress, Loretta Pflaum, the story only slightly leans on information provided by the OECD, with the actual narrative centring around a love story doomed to failure, delving deep enough into the mechanisms of human nature without breaking the magic by being too self-explanatory.

Atrechok

Christine Deríaz

Hard fair faced concrete, narrow angles, slanted perspectives, everything very linear, claustrophobic, a concrete-glass spider web holding the figures seemingly captive. A women who is sometimes blonde, sometimes brunette, a young Romanian whom she hits with hr car, then takes home, then into her bed. A young man? Or two? The narrative lines run over each other, through each other, mixing themselves up, make a new one, open themselves, the figures stay imprisoned no matter how much gets cleared up in the course of the film. Mysterious, stylistically and thematically exciting, and in between a Pakistani, who tells Kafka’s parable of the Gate Keeper in a video installation. Recommended.

Stefan Grissemann

Die Presse

Art scene comedy and migration drama: Lawrence Tooley’s eccentric allegory “Gatekeeper” is showing at Metro Cinema in Vienna

A woman tries to drag a lifeless man through her apartment for minutes on end. This is how “Gatekeeper” starts, direct and subtly disturbing. The young Romanian is down and out, in every sense of the term – severely traumatised from the shocking experiences he was forced to endure at the hands of human traffickers. A wealthy gallery owner (Loretta Pflaum) takes him in, but the relationship isn’t easy.

A deeply sinister comedy

Stefan Grissemann – der standard

Lawrence Tooley, born in Texas and Viennese by choice, made waves with the unconventional Berlin thriller “Headshots” in 2010, hails from the indie and low budget world. In Metro Cinema, where it can be seen up to and including the 16th, Tooley’s “Gatekeeper”, this small, but unfairly overlooked Austrian film – that the director wrote and produced together with Loretta Pflaum – gets a two and a half year delayed chance. It’s built of thriller and noir elements, has traces of envy-driven drama and even some unexpected screwball moments. The psychically precarious life of the protagonist is described in stylised sequences, elegantly filmed by Tom Jide Akinleminu, to modernist music ( Salvatore Sciarrino, Manfred Stahnke, John Zorn). The scenes featuring the highly neurotic horror-sister (Antje Hochholdinger) belong to some of the strongest of the film;  “Gatekeeper” emerges from below the surface of a socially critical art project referencing Kafka as a deeply sinister comedy.

Der Standard

Dominik Kamalzadeh

The very first image of Lawrence Tooley’s Gatekeeper is a riddle. A woman drags an unconscious man over the floorboards of her fashionable Viennese loft. Her name ist Elly (Loretta Pflaum), a gallery owner who spends her nights cruising through Vienna in a black pageboy wig. He is a young Romanian without papers whom she has hit with her car. Exactly why she takes him in we do not know – but we can be certain that her actions are not entirely selfless. The man’s background also remain mysterious. He is portrayed by two actors, (Anghel Damian and George Pistereanu.)These irritations make is obvious that Tooley – who wrote the script together with his partner Pflaum – is not taking us in the direction of social drama. Instead of typical ascriptions (the refugee and the well-to-do woman), the film leaves the characters refreshingly opaque. The foreigner sleeps a lot during the day, household chores are forbidden to him (“I don’t like domestic!”). The art expert prefers the aesthetic view of her new sub-letter and enjoys his presence like that of a pet.

The tidy and pleasurable way in which Tooley translates feelings into space reminds us of Asian cinema.

dominik kamalzadeh

She records his somnolent monologues at night. Is he really the traumatised victim of human traffickers that Elly’s ex-boyfriend takes him for? Luckily the film pursues such speculations only casually. Only people outside of their world try to impose identity onto them. Both sides profit from each other in Elly’s loft: Eroticism develops as the man begins to return her gaze.
The tidy and pleasurable way in which Tooley translates feelings into space reminds us of Asian cinema. Body language and camera perspectives tell us as much as dialogues do. Gatekeeper, now showing for a short time at Metro-Kino, demonstrates very beautifully that you can only see someone else if you allow irritations.

Excerpts

Gatekeeper is a subtle examination of the hidden fault lines created by migration, identity and the consequences of economic transgression.

florian Widegger

–

Aplinkkelis

A story about a romantic soul in an unromantic world, Aplinkkelis tells of a Lithuanian farmer who walks back to his tiny village after being forgotten at a gas station in Germany. “Aplinkkelis” means “detour” in Lithuanian, and the film takes us a road where communication breaks down, where silence replaces speech, where the modern world is left behind. Aplinkkelis traveled to several film festivals before being aired in Germany. It won the Prix du Jury Press in Brest.
With Liubomiras Laucivicius, Marisa Growaldt
37 Minutes, Color, 35mm

Produced for Rundfunk Brandenburg TV