ABOUT
Marina Shron is a Russian-American award-winning writer/filmmaker/author, based in New York.
Marina enjoyed a successful career as a playwright before turning to filmmaking. She has received awards and funding for her work from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the James Thurber Foundation, and the Fund for Mutual Understanding, among others.
Marina’s first short film as writer-director, Lullaby for Ray, starring Estelle Bajou and Alfredo Narciso (Homeland, Demolition), won awards and screened in festivals around the world, including Toronto and Cannes. Sea Child (produced in Colombia and starring Argentinian child-star Federica Cafferata) premiered at the 2015 Fantasia Film Festival and went on to screen at numerous other festivals.
Throughout her career, Marina enjoyed close collaborations with many artists, including filmmaker Tony Pemberton, theater artists Ian Belton, David Greenspan, and Jim Findlay, and computer scientist Dennis Shasha. She co-wrote Tony Pemberton's feature film Buddha’s Little Finger (starring Toby Kebbell). She also co-authored the book of oral histories, Red Blues: Voices from The Last Wave of Russian Immigrants, with Dennis Shasha.
Marina received her MFA from NYU, Tisch School of the Arts, Dramatic Writing Program. A former Fulbright scholar, she teaches screenwriting and film at the New School University and Rhode Island School of Design.
Films
Sea Child
A short film written/directed by Marina Shron
A girl is drawn to the lake where her father disappeared before she was born. She is both scared and fascinated by the water. It’s heavy like lead and cold to the touch, and it wraps around her body like new skin…
The film premiered at Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal, July, 2016. Screened at Aesthetica International Film Festival and 12 other festivals. Distributed by TV Shorts International, Fandor, Amazon Prime.
Described by critics as a “haunting portrait of grief and desire in the tradition of Terrence Malick.”and “an aquatic journey of surrealism”
The film is available for download on iTunes via Play Festival Films App.
Buddha’s Little Finger
A feature film co-written by Marina Shron, directed by Tony Pemberton, starring Toby Kebbell. Based on Victor Pelevin 1996 novel “Chapayev and Void.”
During an interrogation in 1991, a Russian gangster begins to think he is a poet in 1919, fighting in the Russian Revolution alongside Bolshevik commander Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev and his formidable machine-gunner sidekick, Anna.
Produced by Rohfilm, Germany-Telefilm, Canada. Released in 2016.
Lullaby for Ray
Written and directed by Marina Shron.
A cinematic poem about one day in the lives of two New York vagrants. Christina and Ray, an unlikely but devoted couple, journey through the changing emotional landscape of the city where each location marks the next stage in their quickly unraveling relationship.
Premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2011, won the Best Short Film Award. Screened at the Atlantic Film Festival and 15 other festivals. Distributed by TV Shorts International and Play Festival Films. Available on iTunes and Amazon Prime.
The film is available for download on iTunes via the Play Festival Films App.
The Silent Love of the Fish
A short film written by Marina Shron, directed by Vivian Sorenson.
A surreal tale of fish eaten and innocence lost…
Premiered at the Hamptons International Film Festival, winning the Best Short Film Award. Screened at Chicago International Film Festival and 16 other festivals. Premiered on TV at Channel 13.
“... Told in first-person with a mix of idealism and romantic exaggeration (this does, after all, begin with a literal tightrope walk to a lover's window), these are impressions recalled with the innocence of a first love and the hindsight of a broken heart. Director Vivian Sorenson offers imagery to match the narration, transforming meal into a snow globe where clouds of sifted flour fall as snowflakes... “ (from the review by Sean Axmaker)
In PRE-PRODUCTION
The Fruit of Our Womb
Psychological Horror Fable
When a feral teenage girl becomes an object of fixation for a wealthy woman and her husband, the marriage cracks, revealing the violence beneath privilege and maternal longing.
A feature film, written/directed by Marina Shron
Books
The Fruit of Our Womb
"I have taken Christina's story through various incarnations - from a stage play to a short film and ultimately, this script. The reason behind this journey is my fascination with Christina as a character. A refugee from an unknown country, she is equally an outsider in both worlds she inhabits – one of poverty and abuse and the other of affluence and opportunity... This book as well as the upcoming film — is a disruptive social parable that challenges the conventional notion of Family. Christina is a catalyst for re-examining its meaning — and the meaning of motherhood. “
-Author’s Note
Available from (Screen)Play Press. Purchase Here.
Red Blues: Voices from the Last Wave of Russian Immigrants
“Red Blues offers a window onto the daily struggles and personal transformations of immigrants of many backgrounds and personalities: Jews and non-Jews, soldiers, rocket scientists, painters and exotic dancers, a film director turned tailor, a dominatrix turned governess. Their oral memoirs are rich with detail and shot through with strains of emotion that are too rarely included in immigrant studies. One comes away from this book feeling the bitter taste of lost culture and status, the exhilaration of testing oneself in a new culture, the ambivalence of loving the new and longing for the old.”
—Annelise Orleck, author of Soviet Jewish America
“Red Blues offers a fascinating picture of the experiences of recent Russian immigrants. Through a series of oral histories, the immigrants present their own stories of their lives in the former Soviet Union and why they left—and the challenges they face in making a new home in America. The stories make compelling reading.
—Nancy Foner,
author of From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration
“[In Red Blues] people compare what they left with what they came into. It isn’t as one-sided as you might expect. America is another planet, they find, one with a fierce competitiveness and different values. The immigrants are frequently eloquent about the nature of friendships there, those communal bonds the precariousness of Soviet life fostered. …The stories are as varied as the tellers. One says: to immigrate is to strip yourself bare. Maybe readers are archeologists rather than voyeurs and find old clothes more interesting than naked bodies. That country, the Soviet Union, is no more. And this America is one not so much strange, as ‘misaccustomed.’ These are voices of people who, with little help or preparation, have had to unite different worlds within themselves.”
—Mark Halperin,
former Fulbright Lecturer at Moscow State Linguistic University
Available on Amazon.com and at Barnes and Noble.
Plays
EDEN
Experimental Drama – 4 actors (2w, 2m)
Two vagrant performers—one amateur, one professional—live and perform inside a storefront window. Is it a job? Performance art? Reality theater? Safely hidden behind glass yet shamelessly exposed to passersby, the two gradually blur the boundaries between performance and life, clashing, merging, and unraveling in a desperate search for something more real than reality itself. But when a third character enters their carefully constructed Eden, their experiment in authenticity takes an unexpected and unsettling turn.
Production History:
Production ChaShama Theatre, NY
Workshop English Theatre of Berlin
Awards: Developed with the support of Fulbright Foundation Scholar Award
TIME AND THE BEAST
Experimental Drama – 3 actors (2w, 1 m)
Partly inspired by the biblical story of Jacob and the sisters Rachel and Leah, who become his wives, the play follows their unstable love triangle as it spirals through time and history.
The story begins on a mythical island, where Jacob, Rachel, and Leah first meet and form their fragile, enduring triangle. When their story reaches an abortive end, it resurfaces on a historical island—Ukraine in 1918, amid the Russian Revolution—then moves to Germany in 1943, during the Holocaust, and finally to present-day New York. Rachel, Leah, and Jacob mature alongside History itself, their intimate story caught in the currents of revolution, catastrophe, annihilation, and memory.
Production History
Workshop English Theatre of Berlin
Workshop Ohio State University Theatre Department
Reading New York Women’s Project and Productions, New York
Production Mac Wellman Festival, House of Candles, New York
Publication: Next Stage Press. Purchase here.
Awards: James Thurber Fellowship in Playwriting
CHRISTINA
Drama – 4 actors ( 2f, 1 m, 1b)
A taboo-breaking drama about a 13-year orphaned girl adopted by a wealthy couple. Once dropped inside their world, she will either make it explode or alter its entire fabric...
Production History:
Production Soho Rep Theatre Festival of New Work, NY
Reading Playwrights Center, Minneapolis
Reading Playwrights Horizons Theatre, NY
Publication: Next Stage Press. Purchase here.
Awards: Jerome Fellowship in Playwriting
KING OF RATS
Surrealist Drama – 5 actors (2f, 3m, 1b)
A fat, clumsy ten-year-old boy observes life inside a house “with breathing walls.” His father, who seems to have forgotten his dead first wife, lives with his new wife Lena and his dying—but lustful—father. When the Old Man finally dies, Lena leaves, only to be replaced by a mysterious woman who emerges from beneath a pile of rags. Then the Old Man returns to life, demanding food at the dinner table. Lena gives birth to a child and returns on the day of her husband’s wedding…
Production History:
Production New Georges Theatre, NY
Workshop Playwrights’ Center of Minneapolis
Awards: New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship
MITYA’S ORDEAL
Drama – 6 characters (2w, 4m)
A stage adaptation of “Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor Dostovesky.
Production History:
Commissioned by Peculiar Works Theatre Company
Written with the support of Mac Dowell Foundation
Production Lincoln Center Theatre Brothers Karamazov Festival
DAY FOUR
Experimental Drama - 4 characters (2w, 2m)
A stranger arrives in the house where mother and daughter that share the same name bide their time oblivious to the world outside. With his arrival, the creation clock is reset…
Production History:
Workshop New York Theatre Workshop
Published by Russian Poetry Fund (bilingual edition).
these plays are available on the National New Play Network’s New Play Exchange.
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