André Thomas Dryansky

I am a Franco-American diehard internationalist and people lover, based in Amsterdam, currently working as an English <> French AIIC conference interpreter after having served the UN in Cambodia for close to 9 years in the English booth at the Khmer Rouge trials (UNAKRT).

I am a language professional but I come from film and writing. A clear example of this junction is my Paramaribo Technique. Whilst on holidays in Surinam in 1999, I invented an English language teaching method consisting in developing proficiency through the creation and description of images - “imagination”- which I implemented by organizing group screenwriting workshops. I taught this method for 4 years in engineering consultancies around Paris.

In Amsterdam, I regularly wrote for the AMSTERDAM WEEKLY, namely a feature on the Roma-Sinti community of the Netherlands and a tribute, for the Dutch “freedom day” celebrations of the end of WWII, to the last surviving Dutch veterans of the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War.

And when I was living in the US, I worked as a junior reporter in New York, for the VILLAGE VOICE and NEW YORK NEWSDAY, covering neighborhood news, crimes and the homeless.

I also made my own films: two internationally recognized documentaries and a 16mm fiction short: Upriver in Time; A family in France, A story about the passing of time; Reds Get Blue.

Upriver in Time tells the story of the confrontational return to the Saramaka Maroon kingdom of a Saramaka nobleman after spending a year as a gardener in Paramaribo. The Maroons are the descendants of the runaway slaves of Suriname. The film was broadcast on ARTE France and Germany, shown in festivals worldwide, from Rwanda to Estonia, and awarded a special acknowledgment at the Berlin Black International Festival in 2005.

A Family in France, A story about the passing of time tells the story of the disintegration of rural life in France .

Reds Get Blue, which I wrote and directed, portrays a dictatorial America of the near future. The unemployed, who lose all of their rights are driven to “redeem” themselves by volunteering to defend the Nation at war (the CAN or “Consolidated American Nation”), as always. Yet the war they volunteer to fight in does not exist. It is only a radio creation, as images of the war are prohibited for security reasons. The aim is to bring the “volunteers” to pseudo recruitment centers where they are then gunned down. That is how the problem of unemployment is dealt with. The film was shown at the 1995 Deauville Film Festival and released theatrically at the Entrepôt arthouse in Paris.

Otherwise, I worked extensively in Africa: as the Tanzania coordinator and report writer for a Dutch environmental education NGO, running documentary workshops in Senegal and on documentary and multimedia projects in Burkina Faso and Ghana.

I was graduated from the Columbia Univer¬sity Film Division (MFA, Film Directing) and from Harvard (A.B., Philosophy).