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 invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Production is now due to resume and wrap up in Israel after the New Year for a 2024 release.
Both the film’s German executive producer, Max Gutbrod, and Dutch-born music supervisor and conductor, Arthur Arnold, were previously based in Russia and had to flee the country as a result of the war. They are both featured in the documentary-within-the-film.
Mishory’s own doomed efforts to make the film in Moscow have fed into the rebooted production.
“When it became clear that the project’s impossibility (and what it represented) was in fact the story I needed to tell, I created the character of The Filmmaker, around whom the entire film now revolves. And when I created The Filmmaker, I knew I wanted to work with Lior Ashkenazi. Better than any other actor I know of, he can inhabit the space between comedy and tragedy. I’m so glad he is joining us for this adventure,” says Mishory.
Monolithic’s Fernandez said he was drawn to the project for its unique structure and its exploration of the power of art 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 perseverance under an authoritative regime offers a necessary lesson for all of us regarding the emancipating, crucial role of film and music in this age of war, violence, and repression.”
Mishory’s previous films include DOC LA 2023 award winner Fioretta, which is currently on release; Who Are the Marcuses?, No Place of Exile and Absent as well as Joshua Tree, 1951 and Delphinium: A Childhood Portrait of Derek Jarman.
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