about
When Thessa Mooij left home to study Russian, her great aunt gave her a 1939 kopeck. Shortly after that, she got sidetracked by Dante Alighieri, Jim Jarmusch and journalism.
But when she was hit by a second wave of Slavophilia thanks to Aleksei Balabanov, she dug up the Russian coin and wondered what a Dutch circus artist had been doing in the Soviet Union just before the outbreak of WWII.
The Dutch Film Fund commissioned Thessa to write that story, The Wild Field, as a feature-length script. During a three-year spell in London, she worked as a screenwriter (the Film Fund supported a second screenplay Pizza Pipa), journalist (Screen International) and film programmer for the Goethe-Institut.
In 2003, Thessa parked her red Olivetti typewriter in Brooklyn, where she was selected by Dutch broadcasters to write the Bollywood comedy Laksmi. A contributor to Cineaste and Kamera.co.uk, she taught film criticism at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
When she’s not eavesdropping on Russian conversations in the Brighton Beach-bound Q train, she is in a library somewhere - turning The Wild Field into a novel or running around at a festivals, promoting films with her publicity firm Silversalt PR.
