Lior Ashkenazi Boards Matthew Mishory’s ‘Mosolov’s Suitcase’ As Filming Resumes Following Ukraine War Hiatus
22.12.2023 - 12:25
/ deadline.com
EXCLUSIVE: Actor Lior Ashkenazi has boarded Israeli-American filmmaker Matthew Mishory‘s Mosolov’s Suitcase, exploring the life and legacy of Ukrainian, early Soviet era, avant-garde composer Alexander Mosolov.
Ashkenazi, who is Israel’s biggest acting star, is known for his award-winning performances in Israeli features Late Marriage, Footnote, Foxtrot, Walk On Water and Karaoke as well as HBO series Our Boys.
He is currently appearing opposite Helen Mirren in Guy Nattiv’s Golda Meir bio-pic Golda.
Mosolov’s Suitcase is a joint production between Alvaro Fernandez at L.A.-based Monolithic Films; Gidi Avivi at Vice Versa Films in Tel Aviv, and Rubber Ring Films, the joint Santa Monica-based company of Mishory and Bradford L. Schlei.
The upcoming picture is described as a hybrid, black-and-white meditation on the titular’s subject’s controversial life, told through three stories about creation and individualism in the face of state power.
In the first of three intersecting plotlines, a celebrated film director (played by Ashkenazi) recounts his unconventional efforts to complete a film abandoned in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In the second, Mosolov’s persecution in 1930’s Stalinist USSR and efforts to smuggle his music (reported lost in a stolen suitcase) into the West play out in fragments of an incomplete film.
The third story will be told in the form of a mini-documentary filmed in 2019 in Moscow in which nonagenarian rebel musicologist Inna Barsova reveals her decades-long quest to rehabilitate Mosolov’s legacy.
Filming on the project first began in 2018 and 2019 in Moscow but the production was put on hold due to the Covid-19 pandemic and then had to be abandoned entirely following the Russian