Author: Alexander De Koning

“Please don’t write that down,” confesses Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović. I had asked about cinematic influences on her debut feature film, Murina, which premiered in the Director’s Fortnight category the previous night at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Executive produced by Martin Scorsese, Murina follows Julija (Gracija Filipović), an athletic teenager who rejects the obedience her father expects of her when his foreign friend pays a visit. Murina rightfully won this year’s Camera d’Or for best first feature – the same award Jim Jarmusch and Steve McQueen have won in the past.

The Croatian filmmaker and I meet at the La Quinzaine beach, a cabana situated just at the footsteps of the legendary Carlton Hotel. As I’m brought down to meet Kusijanović, there’s a surprise I did not see coming when she stands to shake my hand: she’s nine months pregnant.

“Oh wow, when are you due?” I ask.

“Now,” she laughs. What if the big moment happened during this interview? I try to make this interview less laborious than they usually are. “I take my influences from theater, from paintings, from locations, mostly,” she continues on about her inspirations. “I come from a family of painters and architects, so I think that most of it was born through that. Usually when I make my story boards, they’re always paintings. But also, visually, I build. Location is very important for me because location also informs the psychology of the character. And then seeing people move in that location is also what informs how they need to be portrayed.”

“So going off that, how much did the landscape direct you?” I follow up.

“Incredibly,” Kusijanović lets loose. “Because I was looking for that landscape. It was of course somewhere in the back of my mind growing up there. But for me it was very important to find a location without any vegetation. Even though Croatia is very green, and islands are very green. I was looking for places without any trees, because I wanted the characters to be as if they were on a plate like a raw meat: completely burned, exposed, under this heat in both their desire and violence.”

“In terms of casting, what did you see in Gracija for the lead of Julija?” I ask.

“Gracija [Filipovic] is a professional athlete. She’s a swimmer and dancer. She started as a non-actress in my short film, Into the Blue, and through that experience I got to know her better and understood that I wanted to make a feature film with her. And then I built the casting of everyone else around her. We would spend weeks with actors to test these synergies.”

The casting and costume choices seem to go hand-in-hand with the choice of locale, given how natural the swimsuits are on Julija versus her disdain for other clothing, “land” clothing. “She has a mastery of not so much the land but the water,” I add on. “And the difference in costume is very much an act of rebellion by her. When she’s in dresses, they don’t really fit well on her.”

“It’s very obvious when you put a character in an outfit they don’t belong to. It’s even referenced in the film, ‘I’m not gonna wear this. It’s not mine, it’s yours.’ But it’s also so rewarding when you give a person something they really feel as their second skin. Murina is all about skin, so we also tried to metaphorically dress Julija in that same way, with her skin. And she sheds different skins throughout the movie – one is from her family, and one is coming from the foreigner. That is a new skin, an improved skin. A skin which is braver and more persuasive for [going after] what she wants.”

“In directing the physicality of Julija, what was the seed you implanted in her mind to direct her? Because I could tell she was very much a master of her water environment.”

“Sometimes you have to direct others to give the right mood for her. That’s why it was very important to have the right team around her, because certain things need to remain hidden. Especially to such a young actress such as her. And it helped to spend a lot of time – over a month – with everyone together in a house where they lived like a family. They cooked and fished together. They built this real synergy.”

“Throughout Murina, she’s always in conflict. She’s never belonging to the on-shore environment. What would you say her central flaw is that drives the story engine of the film?”

Kusijanović has to take a moment to ponder. Then, a light bulb goes off: “She is quick to conclude,” Kusijanović declares. “She’s a teenager. She thinks she knows everything. She thinks she sees beyond things. She has strong convictions. And she’s very impulsive, very courageous. Which being courageous is a very good thing to be, but sometimes maturity and wisdom is lacking. Yet, she gets slapped throughout the film, and she readjusts quickly, which is a sign of intelligence, I think.”

“Where did you meet [Gracija] originally?”

“I did a casting for a music video. It was a little Croatian band. Actually, now, a bigger band – Silente – from Dubrovnik. I did a casting for kids for that specific video. And Gracija was in that casting.”

“What drew you to her?”

“She doesn’t have to speak to tell things,” she reveals. “For me, it was mostly to say less. She has [natural presence] in front of the camera. And it’s very interesting to watch her, for me at least. So for me it was a deduction of the script. [I’m always] finding opportunities where I can deduct on a script, on a shoot, and in post.”

“You’ve attended labs at the Berlin and Sarajevo Film Festivals, attended La Femis, Columbia University… You’ve won awards at these laboratories, festivals, and institutions, even been nominated for a Student Academy Award. How does it feel to be thrown into the beast of Cannes?”

“I am very very grateful and happy to be in Cannes, especially this year. Even though we’ve been in a lack of festivals for a year and a half, it’s been very difficult for all the people in the film industry. So this year is somehow special, it’s like reincarnation year. So to be part of the festival this year is like even more rewarding than any other. And I’m very grateful.”

“Murina is your first feature, what’s next for you?”

“I’m open to new opportunities. I never liked to be bound by like a specific thing… I’m always following the characters and complex stories and open to be surprised, to change. I am writing a couple things right now and one of them is set in New York. It’s a shadow metropolis and it’s kind of a woman confronting her tribe once she realizes her husband cheated on her.”

“And you’re based in New York, yes?”

“I’m in between places. I’m in between New York, Debrovnik, and Zagreb.”

“Does New York influence your work? Especially in this movie?”

“It’s very important sometimes when you make certain films to be very local. And at other times to have distance. And of course New York gives me distance from Croatia, and Croatia from New York. So yes, both places inform each other.”

“Do you plan on going back to music videos at all?”

“Why not? I’m always open to everything, y’know? It’s a great form because you can explore. You can do things that you can’t do in film.”

“It’s not very narrative friendly, though.”

“It could be. It could be. Anything can be exactly whatever you want it to be. And that’s what’s exciting. Otherwise we’re just, y’know, working inside some types of forms, which is not exciting.”

Murina most recently won awards at the Hamptons International Film Festival and the Slovene Film Festival, and will be screening at the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival this month.

Featured image courtesy of First Films First.

Censorship is a scary thing, but it could be particularly dangerous when it involves assimilation and heritage. Nadav Lapid has been tackling these subjects for ten years now, straddling the line between sensitivity, morality, and justice. Ahed’s Knee is his latest, confronting the subject of censorship head on. Winner of this year’s Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Ahed’s Knee follows a filmmaker named “Y” (Avshalom Pollak) who attends a screening of his previous film held by the Ministry of Culture in a remote village at the far end of the Israeli desert. While there, he befriends an officer of the ministry, Yaholom (Nur Fibak), as he’s forced to succumb to the nation’s censorship standards. Originally, we had planned to meet in person at Cannes, but a COVID scare forced Nadav Lapid and actors Avshalom Pollak and Nur Fibak to conduct this interview via Zoom where we talked about censorship, assimilation, and what it took to make a film that’s so critical of the Israeli government, especially in today’s political climate.

“I think that it’s about how to be…” begins Lapid. “…is it impossible to be normally Israeli, in a way? But I think its relevant to a lot of places. Is it possible to be normally Russian? Is it possible to be normally Brazilian? Is it possible to me normally Polish? Where do we situate ourselves… from submission and collaboration, to resistance and endless anger that in the end dehumanizes all others, and makes all others enemies? I’m always obsessed with what I see as Israeli collective soul, mainly because it’s also my soul, and with Israeli collective DNA, mainly because of the fact it’s also my DNA. But I think that, in the end, it’s a question of how do we live? How do we live in this actual moment in time?”

But Ahed’s Knee’s premise actually stems from a real-life experience not dissimilar from the film.

“All of this was a very unusual creative process,” Lapid continues. “The technical genesis of the thing was when I got this phone call from a bureaucrat at the Ministry of Culture, who was a very intelligent, nice, and curious young woman, inviting me to come to a small village in the desert for a screening of Kindergarten Teacher. And at the very end of our conversation, she added ‘Oh by the way, you must sign a form or I’ll detail the topics of our discussion,’ exactly like in the movie. She said ‘Yeah I’m not very proud of what I’m doing now,’ which was quite surprising – she totally accepted the fact that what she’s doing is wrong, and yet with no problems, she told me afterward, ‘Ok you sign the form and will send it to me by fax.’ Another thing was that my mother was agonizing and dying from cancer, and she was the editor of my movies. I was going to the desert and sending her more or less the same video messages that you see in the movie. Usually writing the script takes me one year, one year and a half, more or less like most other people. I started to write the script three or four weeks after the death of my mother, and edited in two weeks. And 10, 11 months later, we began shooting. So, everything was just like one movement, one gesture. One extremely urgent gesture. We decided to not apply a lot of financial services to shoot in very basic, hard economic conditions, because we prioritized the urgency. Because the urgency was the truth of the thing.”

For the actors, however, it was an exercise in how agile they could be in developing a character, given the limiting circumstances.  

“I joined the project really late,” adds Pollak. “So after joining the project, they were quickly going into shooting. The way the character was conceived or built, it’s like… I can describe it a little bit as like making a dish… how you cook something and put different ingredients inside. So it’s like taking the text, taking the conversation with Nadav, taking my intuition into it, taking my abilities into it, taking my interpretations into it, taking my experience as a person that knows the body of a choreographer… So all of that kind of created this very unique, disturbed, powerful, fragile character in the end. Which I believe it’s also because of the people that were involved in the movie, and the way Nur and I were getting along… that’s part of the magic of creation. I think for Nur, she was on board for a longer time.”

“Maybe for the auditions,” Fibak chimes in. “But I think a month and a half before shooting or something like that they sent me the script, told me ‘you’re in…’ I think that the main thing that I worked with Nadav was to build the whole inside story of [Yaholom], and the whole moment before this story started. And I think when we arrived on set for the start of shooting, I really let go. I really just let the things happen naturally. I worked really hard to just be in the right place, like in a kind of mediation, to be in a particular point and a particular way of how I’m coming to this story. We were shooting in a chronological order, so I really prepared for this to happen naturally for me. And everything was really intense emotionally on set and the script is really, really strong, and the meeting with Avshalom and the way he’s doing his stuff, I just let myself be. And I think when you have freedom on set, things really happen. I didn’t say to myself ‘here you’re supposed to cry, here you’re supposed to be…’ I just dive in.”

His previous film, 2019’s Synonyms, another study on heritage, won Nadav Lapid the Golden Bear at that year’s Berlinale, so surely that had to help speed up financing for Ahed’s Knee.

“Yes, surely it helped,” Lapid admits. “We made the film with I think 1.2 million Euros, something like this, and shot the film in 18 days. I haven’t seen any other films in competition. I’m sure all of them are great, but I doubt any of them were shot under such conditions. Because there were very short days. Nine hours of light in a day because it was winter and the day hardly began and you’re already at the end of the day. So, it helped, but it helped to preserve, as I said, the urgency. It helped us to quickly get a certain amount of money and to say ‘okay, now we go shoot it.’ I think, for me, the main thing that it gave me was the liberty, the liberty to tell myself ‘great, I have this nice golden bear at my house, and now I can go deeper…’ deeper into this deserted, or half-deserted landscape of cinema. It gave me the capacity to tell other people in a way ‘count on me, I know what I’m doing.’ But it gave me the confidence in my own [self] doubt to free the demons.”

“In Ahed’s Knee, you play with objectivity and subjectivity a lot,” I bring up. “Usually, when we see the landscape, it’s subjective to the character, yet you kind of flip that on the head this time: we see the landscape, but it’s objective from [Y’s] point of view, and when it’s subjective from him, we see his objection to the land. But you translate it through these crazy camera movements, this swinging camera language. I wanted to ask why you choose that kind of choreography for the camera to translate that.”

Lapid takes a moment. “I have various answers,” he says. “The most general one I would say is that I find it really hard to understand how, despite the fact that people are so different, they have so many different things to say… 99% of the movies look alike. For me, someone who is writing his most personal text… personalizing the form of your movies is I think the most logical and rational step, to take it out from the 30,000 movies done exactly the same way. Especially in this movie, I’m a huge believer in what I feel is the true deep essence of the moment. As we know, the true deep essence of the moment doesn’t end in the concrete or the practical description of what’s happening. I mean, in general, especially in such a movie, you must go deeper. Penetrate the object. It goes to the mind, the thoughts, the reflection, the heart, the emotions… and it’s super hard to do it with a camera. It’s much easier to do it when you’re a painter, for instance. When you’re an expressionist German painter, when you’re Jackson Pollock who’s running and hitting the canvas. But with a camera it’s hard, because a camera is a very concrete thing. Put down the camera and you see what’s happening in front of you. Sometimes you have to battle with your own camera. You have to spoil it. And some of this movement is like tentative to make the camera sweat, to make it less confident, less distant, so that the camera won’t feel so comfortable.”

Lapid’s films, as a result, do not stem from traditional cinematic influences.

“Before shooting a movie,” Lapid continues. “I feel I can watch 15 movies a day. Not entirely, of course, but small pieces, fast forward and backwards. But I fill myself with cinematic gestures, so I have maybe 20,000 references and influences. But I think in the end, my films – you can love them or hate them – are in a way, mine. I think that they have a certain core, a certain substance that’s distinguished from others. And second, I feel that my references… prevent me from falling to cinematic evidences. Think about shot-reverse-shot: I mean, for me, it’s not logical when 99.9% of the dialogue in the movie is shot in a shot-reverse-shot. And you see one person talking, then the other talking, or maybe one talking, one listening. I mean the conversations are super different – sometimes they talk about the second world war, sometimes they talk about their bathroom, sometimes they talk about their son, sometimes they talk about sex. But they’re always more or less shot in the same way. So I think all these directors that help me detach myself from the evidence and reinvent and rethink my conventions are my kind of references.”

“There’s a line in the film,” I follow up, “that goes ‘in the end, geography wins.’ And I wanted to see how you interpret that line and what it means to you. Because it was striking when it was on screen.”

“That comes from my mother,” Lapid gets candid. “This was one of the favorites of my mother when she was talking about Israel. And as [Y] says in his short introduction, she wouldn’t say it in a positive way… It means that you can be as much as you want in a kind of position of resistance, detached. In the end, you become another detail in landscape.”

“I tend to never get a very definite understanding about anything,” admits Shalom. “I always try to keep possibilities. So it’s not one thing, in my opinion. I think it’s both geographical as it is political, or as a country, a nation, a society, and so on. But geographically, it’s also like nature. It’s the nature of what’s going on. It’s the Earth… So I think this is something that is much more… it takes you to places that are much wider than being specific about what it is.”

Fibak, however, is a little more exploratory. “I don’t really know. I think every time I hear this sentence I’ve taken it to another direction. When I only read [it] on paper, it’s not something really logical to me, but I felt something really strong about the land. And that we are all the time fighting or loving things that are connected to, in our country at least, the land, the earth, a map, boarders, and sand. It’s really connected to Israel. The whole story of desert and things like that. It wasn’t something really where I understood the meaning. And I think this is what’s really powerful with this sentence – that it’s changing all the time, and it’s really open. It’s strong because it’s…,” she scrambles, trying to grasp the right words.

“…Well there’s something very interesting now from what Nur was saying,” Pollak swoops in. “For Israelis, when they talk about Israel, most of the Israelis say ‘Ha’aretz,’ and the interpretation of Ha’aretz is ‘are you returning to the land.’ It’s a very kind of, y’know, as Nur was saying, a very important flow. Even to the Jews… they found a piece of land where they can be, where they can run away from all their problems, etc. I think the great thing about it is it’s not like something that has a straight forward meaning, but it kind of triggers something that can go and go and go and go.”

Fibak follows up, “But I think that it’s really interesting that in the movie, it’s a meeting between someone like Avshalom’s character who is living big city life… but coming to a place where all the people there are working the land. And the image of coming from the sky in an airplane to a place that is really grounded and people are not dealing with the big questions and stuff like that. I don’t know. This is for me what the meaning was. I don’t think I have an answer. But I have a lot of answers.”

Then, as the dust settled, the elephant in the room finally made itself apparent: How comfortable were they being a part of a film that is so critical of their government?

There’s a beat of silence. After the tense moment, Lapid gives in, “I’m not a political journalist, not a political expert in any way. I think that Netanyahu is a terrible prime minister, but he wasn’t worse than his period, or his time, or the spirit. I mean he was pushed by an extremely dominant spirit that existed and still exists in Israeli society. For me it’s funny that they call themselves the ‘government of change’ or something like this. I mean, where’s such a change? They are the oldest new government I’ve ever seen I think.”

“I can say about myself… that I didn’t look… I don’t know,” Fibak adds on. “It’s a really good story. And it’s really important to do really good art and tell really good stories. And to be part of art that is saying something today is sometimes not so easy… films that are trying to change or trying to do something bigger and not just, y’know, achieve fame and stuff like that. So, it was, for me, really a good opportunity to be part of something big and important. And I didn’t really think in the beginning about what would happen next. Because I’m working as an actress in this project, but… I don’t know.”

“I don’t think it’s about what will happen next, it’s about what’s happening before,” follows Pollak. “In my opinion, I think it’s irrelevant. I think it’s the wrong kind of discussion from the beginning, whether you should be careful not to criticize or go against the general opinion of the country by creating a creation or a piece of art. I listened in the press conference to this question, and I think there’s a very simple answer to that: why not? Why not give money to things which criticize? As actors or artists, people criticize us. And we’re getting money, and the people who criticize get money, and this is what they do. Because this is a part of democracy and a society that is trying to advance. So that’s a very kind of, I think, simple answer. On the other hand, for the real people who want to change something, and really oppose… they are giving up so much of their lives in order to do that. And this is also a big, big question: whether giving up your life will make a change in the end.”

In the end, it may seem daunting that governments with such power over censorship could still exist in the world, despite funding and praising art that criticizes. Because in the end, geography always does win – even with Nadav Lapid on our side.

Ahed’s Knee will make its North American premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

Featured photo courtesy of Getty Images

Biorhythms are an essential part to how humans move. It’s passed on through genetics, generations, and nurtured by the environment we’re born into. Clara Sola explores such a subject matter. Premiering in the Director’s Fortnight sidebar category at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Clara Sola follows Clara – a rural Costa Rican woman who’s an outcast in her family as she rebels against the behavior expected of her at her niece’s quinceañera. She has a hunchback, walks as if she has a lemon in her shoe, and is at one with the nature around her. So, when I met with the director Nathalie Álvarez Mesén and actress Wendy Chinchilla Araya atop the Scandinavian pavilion on the Croisette, I of course had to delve in about the physicality of the human body, Mesén’s history of being a mime, and how much the environment of Costa Rica directed the film.

“I like to work physically, maybe it’s my interest in the body, and how the body can say more honest things than words a lot of the times,” Mesén goes in. “The idea of the character comes from different paintings and pictures, but the theme actually comes from my co-writer Maria Camila Arias and me growing up in Latin America, and then taking some distance to see what we had been through: the community, the love, but also what restrictions and expectations there were – what we inherited from are mothers, our grandmothers, and how patriarchal norms were reproduced even if men were not there.”

The table over from us at another interview sat Wendy Chinchilla Araya, the lead actress of Clara Sola. One could tell from her presence she was a performer, but not necessarily an actress. “I wrote the script for a younger character,” Mesén added. “But once the casting process started, I wanted to work with a dancer. We weren’t looking for actors, but either performers of some sort or martial artists… something that had to do with awareness of the body. And I knew about Wendy from my teenage years because Costa Rica is a small country, and I was also in the physical theater scene. I kind of saw Clara in her, even if she was doing something very different. There was something in her performance and I wanted to get her to an audition. She was the second one we saw.”

“I’ve never performed in a theater, or a play, nothing,” states Araya. But Mesén trusted her in directing herself from the page. “Everything came from me, but from the images Nathalie gave to me. She’s a mime, so she knows this vocabulary of dance, the vocabulary of the body. She was very clear in giving me images, so I looked into my possibilities and my tools and we just found Clara.”

From watching the film, one can tell Clara is very much in command of her body, but how much of that was physical direction, and how much of it was coming from Wendy herself?

“We worked with a lot of internal images,” answers Mesén. “I give inputs of images and she interprets them in her own way. She’s an incredible dancer and can also choreograph very small movements. Like she said yesterday at the Q&A, ‘I’m always dancing on the inside.’”

“I had to change [my body’s] position,” Araya continues. “But of course I was using a special prosthetic. So I had to prepare before every day. I had to do some exercises for my back so it would be in shape. And after the work of the day, I had to do some stretches and be very physical because I knew it would be very challenging for my back.”

The landscape of Costa Rica very much plays a character in Clara Sola, and one can tell it served as a second director. “You can’t direct nature,” Mesén states. “You have to go by what nature is saying. If it’s raining, it’s raining. If the river is very powerful, you have to be careful with your humans. If the horse doesn’t want to go this way, it doesn’t want to go this way. So you have to adapt, listen, and in the end I think we got the hang of it. And then the wonderful work of my editor, Marie-Hélène Dozo, chose what moments to keep and propose. The nature sometimes played with Clara’s emotions… sometimes it was almost magical.”

“It was so intense, it was impossible not to react,” Araya follows. “I think it helps a lot to build and to understand Clara, Clara’s imagination and Clara’s world. Because we were living in this little country in the mountains, we didn’t see many people. So I think all this nature that was very wild and very present helped a lot to get to Clara.”

Clara has a particular type of posture, but also dons a specific use of costume design in terms of how ill-fitting the costumes are on her. Based on that, would you say that Clara Sola is ultimately about obedience?

“Yes….?” Araya has to ask herself even. “She has a nature that is very opposite to what’s around her in terms of limits. So [these clothes] are also a limit the family puts on her. They tell her what to wear, they tell her how she must look. So it was all a limit from the external world of Clara.”

There’s a moment in the film where (and I don’t want to give it away) we see a crucial body transformation. It almost looks like CGI, but was too real to be real. Could you talk about that?

“Umm,” Araya hesitates. She points to Mesén across the way. “I’m not allowed to tell. But she was very specific… we were rehearsing all the time.” Araya begins to demonstrate, “She said ‘try to feel it from the furthest point down your back, and then it’s better when you go down with your shoulder…’ We tried everything. It was dancing.”