”WHEN JEWS WERE FUNNY” - DIRECTOR ALAN ZWEIG

When Jews Were Funny Film Director Alan Zweig


Alan Zweig was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario and has worked in the film industry as a writer, producer, director, driver, and actor. Before finding success as a filmmaker, Alan Zweig drove a taxicab for fifteen years. Early in his career, Zweig’s short films — Trip Sheet (1976), The Boys (1977) and Stealing Images (1989) – provide rare insight into his early inspirations, influences and themes. They run the gamut from documentary to mock doc to fiction.

Trip Sheet was Zweig’s first film, an impressionistic hybrid doc made in his first year at Sheridan College. Shot on colour reversal stock, the film follows cab drivers on their daily beat, a profession that Zweig himself pursued throughout the 1980s. Unseen for more than 30 years, The Boys, an improvised film shot in semi-vérité style, stars four strangers as best friends. The award-winning fiction film Stealing Images, investigates the notion of the unreliable narrator, the protagonist as poseur. Zweig used a composite of film world acquaintances to shape his lead character, a film director who seems to have everything going for him, but in reality has nothing going on at all. Stealing Images sits where autobiography and parody meet, and is perhaps less a reflection and more a projection of Zweig’s struggle with his own perceived failure. This collection of shorts bridges the gap between Zweig’s work in fiction films and introduces themes, questions and techniques that resurface in his later documentaries.

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