Tiger directors: Jan Schomburg, Lose My Self

German director Jan Schomburg’s second feature Lose Myself centres around a successful woman who suddenly finds herself suffering from retrograde amnesia, a condition which wipes the memory of previous biographical events.

The idea for the film came after Schomburg met a woman who was suffering from the condition in real life. “I was stunned by this strange thing we call the brain. How is it possible that you remember that Paris is the capital of France, but don’t remember your parents, and forget how to perform an emotion? I found all these questions exciting and had the urge to dig deeper into this topic,” says Schomburg, who first began working on the script in July 2010.

The film’s main character is played by German actress Maria Schrader, whose credits include Agnieszka Holland’s 2011 film In Darkness and who Schomburg had always had in mind for the role. “It was a film written for Maria. I have been a big fan of hers for years and had always dreamt of making a film with her as lead.”

Schomburg’s debut feature, Above Us Only Sky premiered in the Panorama section at the Berlin Film Festival in 2011 where it won the Europa Cinemas Label for Best European Film.

Like his latest feature, Above Us Only Sky also centered around a strong woman struggling with her identity (in that film she discovered her dead husband was not who he said he was).

“I don’t plan that, but it’s obviously true that both of my feature films deal with questions of the self, I think, therefore I (probably) am,” says the up and coming German director who has found it “a little easier” raising the finance for his second feature.

Meanwhile he has various projects in the pipeline.”I am writing mainly on three different stories and will probably be shooting one of them in Japan this year.”