Lior Ashkenazi enters Matthew Mishory’s Mosolov’s Suitcase as filming resumes after lull in Ukraine war

EXCLUSIVE: Actor Lior Ashkenazi has reunited with Israeli-American filmmaker Matthew Mishory Mosolov’s bagwhich examines the life and legacy of early Soviet-era Ukrainian avant-garde composer Alexander Mosolov.

Ashkenazi, Israel’s leading actor, is known for his award-winning performances in Israeli films Late marriage, footnote, Foxtrot, Walking on water And Karaoke as well as HBO series Our sons.

He currently appears with Helen Mirren in Guy Nattiv’s Golda Meir biopic Gouda cheese.

Mosolov’s bag is co-produced by Alvaro Fernandez at LA-based Monolithic Films; Gidi Avivi at Vice Versa Films in Tel Aviv and Rubber Ring Films, the Santa Monica-based joint venture between Mishory and Bradford L. Schlei.

The upcoming picture is described as a hybrid black-and-white meditation on the title character’s controversial life, told through three stories of creation and individualism in the face of state power.

In the first of three overlapping storylines, an award-winning film director (played by Ashkenazi) gives his unconventional efforts to complete a film abandoned after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The second part finds Mosolov’s persecution in the Stalinist USSR of the 1930s and the attempts to smuggle his music (allegedly lost in a stolen suitcase) to the West in fragments of an incomplete film.

The third story is told in the form of a mini-documentary filmed in Moscow in 2019, in which the more than 100-year-old rebellious musicologist Inna Barsova reveals her decades-long quest to restore Mosolov’s legacy.

Filming on the project initially began in Moscow in 2018 and 2019, but production was suspended due to the Covid-19 pandemic and then had to be completely shut down following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Production is now resuming and wrapping up. after the New Year in Israel for a 2024 release.

Both the film’s German executive producer Max Gutbrod and Dutch-born music director and conductor Arthur Arnold previously lived in Russia and were forced to flee the country as a result of the war. They both appear in the documentary in the film.

Mishory’s own doomed efforts to shoot the film in Moscow helped get production back on track.

“When it became clear that the impossibility of the project (and what it represented) was actually the story I had to tell, I created the character of the filmmaker, around whom the entire film now revolves. And when I started The Filmmaker, I knew I wanted to work with Lior Ashkenazi. He can navigate the tension between comedy and tragedy better than any other actor I know. I’m so glad he’s joining us on this adventure,” said Mishory.

Monolithic’s Fernandez said he was drawn to the project because of its unique structure and exploration of art’s power to resist oppression.

“Mosolov’s story is a powerful reminder of the dangers of censorship and the importance of artistic freedom, and I think it’s a story that needs to be told now more than ever,” he said.

Vice Versa’s Avivi added: “The intersections of music and history, fiction and truth, failure and success are at the heart of this fascinating project… This timely cinematic essay on Mosolov’s persistence under an authoritarian regime offers an essential lesson for all of us about the emancipating, decisive role of film and music in times of war, violence and oppression.”

Mishory’s previous films include the DOC LA 2023 award winner Fioretta, which is currently published; Who are the Marcuses?, Not a place of exile And Absent How Joshua Tree, 1951 And Delphinium: a child portrait by Derek Jarman.