Jürgen Vsych (pronounced Yurgen VY-zick), born in 1968, is the writer-director-producer of more than 30 films, including Son for Sail, Ophelia Learns to Swim, Tyrannosaurus Tex, and Pay Your Rent, Beethoven, which won the Prince's Trust Award.[1] Her films have been shown in forty-three film festivals in thirty countries. Vsych's journal was included in the book World Cinema: Diary of a Day.[2][3] She also wrote, directed, produced and starred in 38 plays and 110 one-act plays.[4]
Vsych is the author of the first autobiography of an American female film director,The Woman Director. Vsych served as Ralph Nader's 2004 presidential campaign photographer and videographer. Her second book, What Was Ralph Nader Thinking? describes how she wrote and directed the film, Ralph Nader Crashes the Two Parties, a mock debate in which Nader - who was excluded from the official presidential debates - debates George W. Bush and John Kerry, using Bush and Kerry's words from the presidential debates and employing G.I. Joe dolls as stand-ins for the candidates.[5][6][7]
Contents |
Wroughten Films, Vsych's production company, derives from the word "wrought", and is also a wordplay on "rot." The company's motto is, "Not the same old rot."[8]
In her autobiography, The Woman Director, Vsych writes: "When I was learning to read, I tried sounding out the name of a sign I saw on Venice Boulevard, 'WROUGHT IRON.' Mom said it was pronounced 'rot,' and it meant that the iron was very good, very well-crafted. Later that afternoon, I went to nursery school and painted with Matilda Gomez. When Matilda painted a really good picture of a boat, I said, 'That's wroughten.' She said, 'It is NOT!' and stabbed me in the eye with her paintbrush.".[9]
The Woman Director: The Adventures of a Really Independent Filmmaker Ages 6–36 by Jürgen Vsych is the first autobiography of an American female film director. It is only the third memoir ever written by a woman director (the other two are by Alice Guy Blache and Leni Riefenstahl), and it is the first written in English.[10] It is based on Vsych's 17,256-paged diary and describes how she graduated from making one-minute Super 8 films financed with baby-sitting money and edited with her father's toenail clippers, to writing, directing & producing the 35mm feature film Ophelia Learns to Swim.