LUCA PASQUALINO<\/a> I don\u2019t come from a Cypriot or South African background, but I do come from an immigrant Italian background. So I\u2019ve been very much brought up around these stories. My grandparents immigrated to England from Italy after the war and then had to go through the struggles of not being from that nation. They sacrificed so much and had to forget everything that they\u2019d ever known, leave it all behind to create a better life for themselves. That part of Nico is part of my family\u2019s history. <\/p>\n\n\tAnd it wasn\u2019t just the financial struggles they faced, but also not knowing the language, not knowing anything about the country. They literally had to start again. So that part of the story very much resonated with me.<\/p>\n
\n\tApart has characters who are not black-and-white but complicated. For example, with Nico, I loved some of the things he says or does and hated others\u2026<\/p>\n
\n\tSTELANA KLIRIS Yes, they are very complex characters. They are very flawed and human. That was very important to me. They are not based on a specific person, but [inspired by] all these characters and people that I grew up with who were never perfect and sometimes had to do something that is maybe a little wrong to survive.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-hollywoodreporter-2021\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\u2018Apart\u2019<\/p>\n
\n\tIt\u2019s a very human element, and what\u2019s great about both Luca and Leem is that they really brought out this complexity. These characters are very three-dimensional, and they were able to really bring them to life in this way. With Luca, you get to see this really great range, because he can be very vulnerable, but his character can also be really hard, and [over time] we understand why. <\/p>\n
\n\tLUCA PASQUALINO Nico is a very proud man. It would break his heart if he wasn\u2019t giving his family the best that he could possibly give them. So, yes, there\u2019s a moral ambiguity to it. The rules are there to maybe be bent or broken in certain ways, and he denies it a lot of the time. But there comes a moment where something shifts in him and he realizes he needs to take risks in life. And he decides that he\u2019s going to go down a slightly alternative route. He does what he feels that he has to do. He has a wife, and he has to provide and care and take matters into his own hands.<\/p>\n
\n\tDid you have an accent coach or so, Luca? How did you develop the way Nico sounds? <\/p>\n
\n\tLUCA PASQUALINO We got there with a lot of time, a lot of repetition and a lot of frustration at times. It takes a lot of hard work when you don\u2019t speak the language. It\u2019s difficult to understand intonation and the flow of dialogue. Early on, our dialect coach would say a line to me, and I thought I said it exactly how she did. But she said no. To my ear, it sounded exactly the same, but to hers it didn\u2019t. So, I hope it\u2019s not awful. I\u2019m happy I got to have that experience, and I hope people can understand everything that we\u2019re trying to say. <\/p>\n
\n\tSTELANA KLIRIS They worked with a really great dialect coach called L\u00e9a Mal\u00e9ni, and Luca had to learn Greek. And they had to speak with an accent. We had multiple dialect coaches. Girley Jazama is actually Namibian, so she had to learn to speak Sesotho. We had Turkish Cypriot actors on set, some of whom didn\u2019t speak any English. So at some point, we had about three or four different dialect coaches and interpreters on set. And in between takes, trying to give notes and talking about the scene just became this cacophony of languages. It was a great multinational experience.<\/p>\n
\n\tWas there any scene that was particularly difficult to shoot?<\/p>\n
\n\tLUCA PASQUALINO Every day was a new challenge. I loved it. But the one thing that stands out the most was just trying to make one scene feel as tragic as possible. There\u2019s a moment where Nico talks about his brother and how he was kidnapped and murdered. At one point, I fell into this hole of overthinking it. But a couple of days before [we shot it], I decided I knew the lines, but I was not going to think about it anymore. And then the day we shot that scene, I was just open to allowing it to happen. There is a moment that was not scripted. I just had to feel that heartbreak within me instead of trying to act.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\u2018Apart\u2019<\/p>\n
\n\tStelana, can you tell me a bit about the visual aesthetic of the film and where you shot it? There are scenes that look a bit like an old home video\u2026<\/p>\n
\n\tSTELANA KLIRIS We shot all of it in Cyprus. We were supposed to shoot in South Africa as well, but it didn\u2019t work out in the end, for various reasons. Cyprus still has a lot of \u201970s aesthetics in terms of buildings and neighborhoods, but we did have to hide a lot of things. And whatever we didn\u2019t manage to hide had to be erased with VFX. <\/p>\n
\n\tWe also used an 8-millimeter camera for a lot of scenes to give it that lovely \u201970s home video look. In fact, a party scene in an apartment is an exact replica of home videos I have from my parents, where immigrant Cypriots gathered in little apartments and squeezed together, having parties. We used some archive footage as well, just to really make it as authentic as possible and really show South Africa in the \u201970s. We\u2019ve mixed it up. Some of it is our own, some of it is archive. Hopefully, you can\u2019t really tell. It\u2019s just all there to immerse people in that era.<\/p>\n
\n\tApart is a historic snapshot, but it also feels quite timely. Or maybe it\u2019s timeless? What do you think?<\/p>\n
\n\tSTELANA KLIRIS I think it\u2019s very relevant. I think everyone can relate to being young and struggling and trying to find your way in the world, regardless of the era or whether there\u2019s a backdrop of war. It\u2019s a very human story and very intimate. And it really tries to boil down to a human level the many problems that we still have, the same problems that we\u2019ve had throughout history. <\/p>\n
\n\tLUCA PASQUALINO All you have to do is turn on the news, and you can see that it\u2019s happening all over the world. The unfortunate, sad reality is that for a lot of people, there is always something to fight over. Even if you were to take the war element out of the script, there are still so many other things going on. <\/p>\n
\n\tThe relationship between Nico and Eleni is the real heart of the film. It\u2019s two people who, for their own reasons, are trying to find a better life, trying to escape, and they end up finding solace in each other. The war is the backdrop for a really emotional, heart-wrenching love story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"South African Cypriot writer-director Stelana Kliris\u2019 parents emigrated from Cyprus and moved to South Africa, leaving one divided…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":681497,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[93,61,1042,60,288182,270,84156,286133,18025,84157,303],"class_list":["post-681496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-international","tag-ireland","tag-luca-pasqualino","tag-movies","tag-poff","tag-poff-2026","tag-rivals","tag-tallinn-black-nights-film-festival","tag-united-kingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=681496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681496\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/681497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=681496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=681496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=681496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}