I was on mars

A small-scale comedy shot in New York on location about a ‘stranger in a strange world’. There are three main characters: the cousins Alio and Nic and a recent arrival in New York Silva. Silva comes from Poland, doesn’t speak a word of English and her few dollars are stolen by Alio. She is forced to make a tragi-comic odyssey through New York and lives ‘on the other side of the dollar’. She would appear to be a naive victim, but her patience is linked to great stubbornness. In the end the too-clever-by-half Alio is not match for her.The film was made in a relatively short period. Levy was actually involved with co-writer and protagonist Maria Schrader (Silva) on a grander, more expensive and more ambitious project: Meschugge. That was intended to be a Jewish love story partly set in New York. Levy didn’t feel like waiting until the finance was arranged and with Schrader he wrote a smaller film set in New York, as it were ‘ to try out this intriguing location’. Levy: ‘It’s pretty strange to shoot in a city where Coppola, Scorsese and Woody Allen have shot.’ It is no coincidence that Levy mentions these film-makers. Alio, the role played by Levy himself, is modelled on the Italian-American gangsters from The Godfather and GoodFellas and the tone of the film has a lot in common with the humour and melancholy of Woody Allen.îLevy combines acting with directing more often; in other films, among them his first, Du mich auch, he also combined both jobs. He also still writes his own scenario.