Cyrus Frisch

Who is Cyrus Frisch?

Cyrus Frisch is a Dutch avant-garde filmmaker. Filmmaker Magazine called him the wild man of Dutch film. According to Holland Film Frisch is one of the most daring filmmakers currently working in the Netherlands.

His debut feature film Forgive me, meant as a critique of reality-TV culture, premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and set his name as a controversial filmmaker. Frisch himself plays the lead in that film. He pretends to be a devilish director without any ethical boundaries in search for the ultimate, exciting film. He uses a group of social outcasts and mentally handicapped as actors.

Frisch is known to have made the first fictional feature film shot with a mobile phone: Why Didn't Anybody Tell Me It Would Become This Bad in Afghanistan, that premiered at major film festivals: the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2007, Tribeca Film Festival 2007, the San Francisco International Film Festival 2007, Pesaro 2007, and several others. According to Dutch newspaper Trouw, Frisch pinpoints the insanity of western society nowadays with this film as precisely as Polanski did in the '60s with Repulsion. In Film Comment Magazine Olaf Muller argues that Frisch's films "embody the stupor we're in as a civilization". The Guardian writes that Frisch is a celebrity in the Netherlands, known for tackling difficult subjects. After graduating from Dutch Film Academy in 1992 he was nominated for the Grolsch Award, one of the most prestigious film awards in the Netherlands.