Nir Shelter shorts and sweets again
Nir Shelter is a director of film, television and theatre whose play ‘Life of Death’ featured in the 2010 festival.
Nir Shelter (Jewish, Sydney writer director with a lot of experience including awards at Short+Sweet for earlier plays – see his bio). This one – on in week one of the festival 8-12 Jan – is a black comedy set in pre WW2 Nazi Germany. The scene is at the Admiralspalast Theatre of Berlin, the main hub for cultural propaganda of the regime. An SS officer suspects the lead actor of Faust of being Jewish and hiding under a Christian identity. He intends to find out the truth about the actor and intentionally mentions that his suspected family were taken to a concentration camp. The actor must now choose between his life or speaking the truth about the regime on stage to the international press present in the audience.
His work has screened at film festivals around the world and played at gala night finals of international theatre festivals.
Shelter graduated from film school at Sydney’s UTS with a bachelor’s degree in media and communications, specializing in story analysis, cinematic cultures and production. He strongly values the importance of hands-on experience; as such, he has worked as an editor, DIT, S3D artist, writer and theatre director since 2000. With a passion for story telling driving his growing interest in the evolving delivery formats of theatre, film and TV, he has directed short plays, short films, commercials, corporate videos, moved readings and collaborated with artists on video pieces. His short film Icemash (2006) screened at the 9th annual film festival in Boston BUFF, the 4Film festival Italy (2007), Globians film festival in Potsdam Germany (2007) and the WT Os film festival in Norway (2007). In the Short+Sweet theatre festival (2010) a play he wrote and directed, ‘Life of Death’, garnered both the audience votes and judges votes. The play went on to gain the judges votes in Short+Sweet Melbourne and Mumbai (2011).
Between 2009-2013 he directed readings at Crash Test Drama – a bi-annual script reading competition. In total five plays of those he directed were voted into the finals, and he won best director on 5 separate occasions. Again in the Short+Sweet festival of 2012 both audience and judges votes went to another play he directed and script edited; ‘The Sum of Your Experience’.