Irish Abroad: Robert Manson’s Lost in the Living wins in Berlin

Irish director Robert Manson was a big winner at the Achtung Berlin Film Festival, where he received the award for Best Director for his feature debut Lost in the Living.

Lost in the Living follows a young man, Oisin (Tadhg Murphy), a musician from Dublin, who travels to Berlin with his band, and is buzzing with the potential for adventure. He leaves behind the weight of losing his mother and an anger towards his absent father.

Oisin meets Sabine (Aylin Tezel), a pretty young Berliner, who shows him the secret places that belong to the people who live in the city; hot parks, uninhabited stations, and lakes in the countryside where the free body culture is still active. These pleasures are thrown into chaos when Sabine reveals that she has a boyfriend and the futility of Oisin’s situation dawns on him. His band have left, he’s lonely, homesick, homeless and broke. He embraces the darkness, tumbles through the void and out the other side.

Lost in the Living, was made by Irish and Berlin based film-makers and by actors in Ireland and Germany during the summer of 2013, and had its world premiere at the festival. The film was a hit with the festival audience, screening four times. The speciality of the week-long Achtung Berlin Film Festival is that it only shows films that have been completely or in part been made in Berlin and Brandenburg.

A graduate of the National Film School director Manson has been making his mark in the Irish film industry with short films for the past number of years. The Silver Bow won the Taylor Art Award in 2008, and has since travelled the world with screenings in over eight countries and more than five nominations and awards. Recent shorts Downriver and Rickshaw Rick have been screened at several festivals nationally and internationally.

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