Dead Lover is the 2025 Midnight Madness at the Toronto International Film Festival closing film. The last midnight madness screening of the year is always a bittersweet night/morning. It is also a celebration of the programme and the filmmakers who premiered their films throughout the ten nights. Tonight Dead Lover directed by Grace Glowicki and co written by Grace and Ben Petrie has a new poster ahead of the closing night screening.
The Napa Boys arrived in style at the Royal Alexandria Theatre in downtown Toronto for their world premiere at the Midnight Madness selection at the 50th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival. Check out the awesomeness here:
Degrassi: Whatever It Takes has it's Toronto International Film world premiere today. Here is a trailer that just dropped for the documentary. Check it out!
Where did the idea for this film come from and how did it evolve from script to shooting?
So much time has passed from the early seedings of the concept to the actual shoot (almost 13 years), so it’s hard for me to pinpoint the definitive moment this journey began. I guess I could start with the short film... I pitched for the Ben Steiner bursary at Deaffest in 2012 and won £5,000 to make a short film that would premiere there the following year. I went back to my friend and producer (James Tracy), whom I made ‘The End’ with, but he rightfully pointed out that the concept I pitched and essentially won with was pretty thin. So I spent some time coming up with new ideas and nothing seemed to land for us both. In the end I messaged James one logline sentence - ‘a deaf cult that communicates solely in sign language’ and he replied with one word: “Yes!”
A few years prior to that point, I had seen a couple of documentaries on cults that really disturbed me, especially ‘Jonestown’, so cults had been on my mind for a few years prior to 2012. After making the short, I felt quite dissatisfied. Aside from the limitations of making a shoestring short, I felt so much of the concept was left unexplored and something was still niggling at me. So I decided to develop it further and as I continued to work away at the concept over the years, the potential to explore the constructs of our identities, particularly the deaf identity, within the structure of a secluded cult became so much meaningful to me and my own personal experience. The deaf community is quite close knit and small, and I also went to a deaf boarding school for 7 years and that was a very insular experience that I also went back to. I also looked at everything from the history of deaf people, to therapy, more cults and thought control tatics... it was a concept that just kept on giving the more I chipped away at it.
So the short answer is, there are lots of contributing factors that have influenced and snowballed the concept - some personal, some inspired by what I’ve read and seen, and the rest simply happened by chance.
Were there any films that influenced you and/or the cast during development?
Too many to list... I am a huge PTA fan and ‘The Master’ was certainly a big influence, as was Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ as I wanted Chilmark to have an ‘Overlook Hotel’ identity about it. However, most of the detail and cult influences in the story came from non-fiction books and documentaries I saw.
I did give each cast member different films to watch for character references. For example, ‘The Truman show’ was interesting from Matt’s perspective and I told Anna Seymour to look at Lesley Manville in ‘Phantom Thread’ because of her authority and handling of the house. I gave Anne Zander ‘Martha Marcy May Marlene’ to watch but there were loads more such as ‘Midsommer’. I got Adam Bassett and Tiannah Hodding to watch ‘The Deer Hunter’ for one particular scene. For Sophie Stone (Mia), I gave her a lot of material on ‘The Family’ and Anne Hamilton Byrne because there weren't many films to reference...
When Eva arrives at Chilmark, she is an outsider integrating into a close-knit group and quickly forms a connection with Matt, who has only ever known life at Chilmark but has growing interest in the outside world.
How did you go about exploring the tension between the dichotomy of these two character’s experiences?
Both Matt and Eva are a bit ‘Yin and yang’ when it comes to the deaf identity, two polar opposites who shift and pivot during the course of the story. I think they both see parts of each other they admire and aspire to have or experience. I think Eva feels like she fractured and is caught between two worlds and two identities. Whereas Matt admires the experience and freedom Eva has, both through her journey on the outside but also in discovering (and essentially choosing) her own identity at Chilmark. He’s surrounded by community and has grown up in a world built for him but this has isolated him and he struggles to connect with everyone else’s shared experience. Their perspectives eventually pit themselves against each other, even though I think they care for one another.
Having a ‘choice’ was something that really stood out of me in the script. Especially when thinking about the deaf identity, as a cultural identity. Throughout the story Mia is telling everyone they have a choice... but the choice has been removed from Matt. Something like 95% of deaf people are born to hearing parents and nobody ever really gives us a deaf identity. They certainly don’t give it to you at school because a lot of us have been brought up to ‘fix’ or ‘deny our deafness and assimilate into a predominantly speaking and hearing society. However, at some point in our lives, usually when we gain independence, we get to choose how we define our identity; whether we see ourselves simply not being able to hear or whether we are part of a cultural minority that has it’s own language, history and community that gives us a sense of belonging. Academics refer to it as the medical model and the social model. I won’t bore you with that... but it’s such a complex and fragile concept to tackle narratively and I tried my best to explore it through these characters in a way that was exciting and entertaining.
There were several different sign language languages (British, German, etc.) used on set. Can you describe that experience and any challenges with translation?
From a writing perspective, I can only write in English and sign language can’t be recorded on the page, not in its entirety at least because it’s so visual and detailed. So there is always a translation process from the page to the screen and in the past it was often left to the actor to take this on but now we have consultants and sign language monitors to do this work.
With this project we had so much to consider... I knew that cults create their own shorthand or codespeak and often use language to control. So we had this functional element to explore with Duffy, Daryl Jackson and the main cast when coming up with completely new signs. In addition to the cult talk, I wanted to create an international community as deaf people come from every country in the world and our experiences are often shared no matter what background or culture we are born into - our connection through lived experiences exceeds our differences. So I was excited to open up the character’s nationalities and together we came up with individual language traits but also a community dialect which is what they mostly sign at Chilmark. I’m excited to bring an international identity to this film through both the language and the themes of the story.
Having worked on the film for so long, I actually get caught out for signing chilmark dialect now. It’s so seeped into me, I am fully indoctrinated. It’s all down to the magic the cast have brought to the film... so blame them!
What was an unexpected challenge you encountered in the making of the film and how did you overcome it?
The producers spent a lot of time prior to the production to make sure it was accessible for everyone not just because it was a sign language film and we had deaf people involved in the making of this film but also for the hearing members of the team. Access is a two way street and a lot of the support in place was also for the hearing members of the crew/team - such as whisper/guide tracks and interpreters in all departments to ensure efficient working environments for everyone.
From a technical and artistic perspective, sign language is visual and so you need a lot more coverage than you would normally have in a spoken language film. Although we have offscreen ‘signed’ dialogue, we don’t have the luxury of hearing dialogue over non-sync visuals like most films do. With sign language you need to see it to understand it, or at least reference it somehow. From the very beginning I knew both deaf and hearing people required subtitles, but I am also someone who is passionate about sign language cinema and I see so much potential to kinetically weave the language into the visual grammar of the film. So my shot lists were pretty high and it ate into our schedule a lot. We also lost a DOP shortly before the production so we had to think on our feet a lot of the time. You always want more time on any film but with scenes in sign language, which was for the majority of the film, I really wanted more time to turn the camera round, cover the performances in more detail. We got the coverage we needed in some scenes, but we had to employ guerilla filmmaking sometimes due to the constraints of the schedule. As a filmmaker who strives for visual control, it was hard to adjust to at times but I’ve learnt so much and have gained a lot of wisdom for this particular style of filmmaking.
For most of the deaf cast and myself, we were making our first feature and whilst we all came in relatively green, the crew were also green in a different way as they had never made a film in sign language before. So it was a great challenge for me to be in the middle of it all, not only trying to explain my vision for the film to people who don’t share my life experience or necessarily understand my cinematic style, but to cue camera moves, cue actors, and to just explain certain situations the most collaborative and efficient way possible. I must stress, I don’t want people to think sign language films take longer to make and are therefore more expensive but there are factors to consider that are logistical, technical and circumstantial. We all learnt a lot but the challenges for deaf actors and filmmakers like myself, is that for every project we move on to, we always have to start from square one. We’ll gain experience but we can’t bring the same crew with us on each project and we won’t always work with the same people. The industry has practices and conventions that are decades old and we have to work hard to bring our own way of making films into this collective experience. By the end of the shoot the cast and crew on Retreat were working together seamlessly having adjusted to the new ways of working needed for this film. As more films in sign language are made, hopefully crews can take this experience forward and set some standards for the industry.
Post-production was a very positive experience. I was lucky to have a dream team, it was such a collaborative experience and we weren’t as constrained by time. My editor Adliena Bichis was amazing, she really understood me as a filmmaker, understood the characters, what we were trying to say with this story and the cinematic experience we wanted to create. She didn’t use the voiceover guide track, which we recorded on set for the hearing crew members. Instead she used subtitles and focused on the visual performances of the actors. The result hopefully speaks for itself but it was such an enjoyable experience to work alongside her.
As we moved into sound design and the score, Paul Davis and his team, as well as our composer Adam Janota Bzowski, were a joy to work with. I actually felt my deafness during the mix at times, because I obviously don’t hear in the same way as everyone else in the room did, but I was pretty clear in what I was gunning for and my sense of direction in terms of style, tone and texture was intact. I also had my producer Michelle and Adelina coming back to assist us and I’m really proud of what we’ve achieved collectively. The film is definitely a sonic experience as much as it is visual.
What was it like working with the cast? Did their personal experiences influence their characters or storylines at all?
As filmmakers, actors or anything creative, we always bring our own personal experiences to our work if it resonates or applies to the scenes or characters at play. I’ve poured a lot of my own and other people’s experiences into scenes and characters but they are personal to us. Hopefully it shines through authentically in the performances but the film is definitely full of secrets.
I love working with deaf actors and I know a lot of the actors in our community. I watch them as much as I can - whether it’s in the theatre or on screen. Sophie Stone has been my muse from day one. She was a part of the short film and that is where our journey really began. Having seen Sophie’s career develop over the years I was constantly frustrated, not just because I was dying to work with her again, but Sophie’s best work was on the stage and I don’t think everyone gets how special she really is. So I was very motivated to write a juicy role for her and bring her special talent to the big screen. Sophie was constantly there from the beginning, sharing ideas with me, answering my questions and she’d often challenge me with her own questions. Like Sophie, Anne Zander has played such a pivotal part in the development of Eva. She came on board in 2019 after I opened up the role to international actors and she also became something of a muse for me. We spent a lot of time talking about Eva, her backstory, the way she thinks and how she would approach certain situations. Sophie and Anne gave me a lot of energy and motivation to keep going and it’s been a privilege to have written for them both. After a few years of development, I knew my characters so well, they ended up telling me what to write. This is the best experience a writer can have, when you’re no longer trying to force scenes out or come up with exciting stuff to write. You just become an observer, following these complex people you’ve crested, almost as if you’re in a lucid dream. That’s when I know I am on to something, when it’s no longer ‘work’.
The rest of the cast were brought together through auditions set up by Heather Barton and whilst most of them were actors I knew of, we found some amazing new talents such as Anna Seymour, who moved to London from Australia a few years ago. Like Anna, Tinnah Hodding blew us away in auditions and is
such an amazing talent. And then there is Naomi Potsawa who I was also writing for. She was a kid when I started writing Martha and I had to bump up her age with each draft.
James was a newcomer and one of the last people we cast for the film. Heather and the team were sure we had found our last lead and, despite it being such a big role for him to take on so early in his career, he gave it everything. Whenever I watch the film I am really taken back by his screen presence and how much he can convey with just a look or a reaction. I don’t think you can teach or cultivate that kind of talent... you either have it or you don’t, and I think he has so much potential going forward in his career. I’m so proud of him and what he has accomplished with Matt. The production is unique in a number of ways, including the deaf characters being portrayed by members of the deaf community.
Can you discuss what that means to you in terms of representation on screen and how did it impact how you approached shooting?
Well, I’ve gone on record before saying that being deaf isn’t enough when it comes to acting and deaf portrayals. Although representation does matter to me, I still stand by that statement because the cast you see on screen are actors... really, really good actors and yes they happen to be deaf too, but for me, the actor always comes first. We also don’t have that many actors to choose from in our community, so with my casting director, Heather Baston, we cast openly for all of the roles that we auditioned for and only listed age range and linguistic ability. We never reference race because I know the playing field relatively well and knew that we’d find the best actors if we cast the net wide and not be too specific when it comes to character descriptions.
I see authentic portrayals and representation as separate things. It’s great that we bring representation to the deaf community and I know it will mean a lot to people, but I don’t go into my films with this at the forefront of my mind. I strive for authenticity and the best possible way to tell the story. I’m also quite pragmatic and I try to compartmentalise several factors that aren’t specific to the fact that someone is deaf. For example, linguistic ability... you will meet deaf people who can’t sign or haven’t had the opportunity to learn and you will meet hearing people who’ll sign better than many deaf people - whether they’ve mastered the language professionally or they happen to be CODAS. Whilst sign language is our language, it belongs to the deaf community, isn’t exclusive to deaf people. However, there are intrinsic details that only a deaf actor can bring to a role. This can be as subtle as how they can exist in a room, where their eyes are averted to at any given moment or how they physically adapt in spaces with their body. There is so much detail in the performances of the cast and it is just a joy to experience. I tried to write as much as I could into the script but the actors brought so much more and it’s amazing to experience on a big screen.
Whilst the majority of the cast is deaf, a handful of the SAs in the film are not, as we needed to cast our SAs locally for budgetary reasons, and Bryson, who plays The Boy, isn’t deaf but as it was a non-signing role, I felt it was pragmatic for me to direct a child actor verbally. Bryson was such a joy to work with and was such an amazing presence on set. We gave him and his brother each a sign name and he was constantly picking up signs, even though he didn’t have any dialogue in the film.
How did you approach and utilize sound throughout the film to amplify the characters and drive the story?
I knew I wanted to explore phantom sounds and had written a lot of sound detail into the script but the way in which films capture the deaf people through sounds is interesting and often tokenistic. When I was writing the script I kept the tropey ‘POV’ sound of deaf people to a minimum and used it only in places where it worked for the theme. In some scenes I was going for chaos and overlapping spoken dialogue but we actually ended up going the opposite way and I think we’ve taken the ‘deaf sound trope’ to a contemporary place which is exciting. In films such as ‘Children of a Lesser God’, the characters are more or less translated by a speaking character (Hurt), but in others, such as ‘The Tribe’, it’s more observational and they didn’t even subtitle the film to preserve that immersive, observational experience. I feel like we’ve found a middle ground because we hear a lot more than you would normally do in a film with deaf characters. I’m a sucker for montage and I wanted my camera to be free to roam and capture faces reacting to moments, so I knew we needed quite an intimate sound of our characters. We captured and mixed the characters so that we hear their voices or whisperings as they signed, whether it’s intelligible or just to reference them, and I’ve never gone into such detail like that before. We all had a blast in ADR and the actors were just incredible. Having such experienced and talented sound design artists has really elevated this film to another level and it’s been incredible to work with this team.
What do you want audiences to take away from this?
Well it’s funny, I always feel like I have two audiences... my community (the deaf community) and now the mainstream and at times that has been a struggle when writing stories. I generally hope everyone feels entertained and excited about the prospects of sign language cinema, as I think there’s so much potential in making films like this from both an artistic and technical perspective. I hope deaf people feel seen and if they want to delve deeper and think about our identities in more detail... then that’s great but more than anything, I just want everyone to enjoy a cinematic experience.
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Why did you choose Naples as the protagonist, as it were, of Below The Clouds? What attracted you to making a documentary about the city?
Naples, the Phlegraean Fields and Mount Vesuvius form an immense basin of stories. It is a place that moves continuously between surface and depth: ruins, subterranean spaces, clouds, fumaroles, tremors of the earth. But it is equally shaped by the everyday glances that pass between its people: children, archaeologists, firefighters, teachers, sailors. In this territory, there are areas of passage between what is and what could be. There are those who investigate, like the prosecutor; those who preserve fragments of memory, like Mary, the curator at the museum; and many anonymous faces that together draw an affective and moral map. Below The Clouds passes over a world that prefers to hide rather than show itself. It shows characters suspended between past and present, between light and shadow.
Can you tell us about your artistic process? How do you find your stories and protagonists? And how do you go about capturing your images?
Making my films is always a drawn-out process during which indispensable bonds are born. I actively looked for stories and people, but at the same time, I let myself be guided by what I found. The camera becomes a tool for meeting people, and mutual trust grows with the time we spend together. Only then does the time come to film, when the relationship has become alive and authentic.
Naples is usually seen as a city of Mediterranean light and color. Why did you choose to film in black and white?
Cocteau wrote that Vesuvius produces all the clouds in the world. Those clouds led me to the title and the look of the film. Below the clouds, light changes its nature: there are no shadows, and everything shows itself in another form. Black and white has allowed me to give a different definition, to look for a deeper truth in the image than the places, bodies, gestures themselves. Black and white opens up the imagination, it engages you to look at things in a different way. I can't imagine this film in color.
Your films rely exclusively on your images to make their meanings clear, without extraneous explanations. What does that mean for the way you edit your material?
I already started to edit while I was filming. Places, people and actions met in front of the camera and immediately afterwards in the editing room. Editing was not a separate task, but a rewrite that accompanied the film as it took shape. For three years, filming and editing walked hand in hand, day after day, until they became Below The Clouds.
How did your collaboration with Daniel Blumberg (winner of the Academy Award for Best Original Score 2025 for The Brutalist come about? What did he add to the texture of the film?
I have known Daniel for more than 14 years and I really love his experimental music. When I thought of the music for the final scene of the film I could only think of him. My need was not to have a soundtrack, but rather to imagine a soundscape capable of creating a suspended space in certain moments of the film. A fabric of traces, sounds, music where the instruments themselves become unrecognizable while drawing a sonic landscape.
You seem to be especially interested in transitions - between the Ganges and the city of Benares in BOATMAN; between Rome and its surroundings in Sacro Gra; the movement of refugees in Fuocoammare; the borderlands of Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan and Lebanon in Notturno. The Naples of Below The Clouds is also a city of peripheries. What interests you about working in the margins?
For me, the margin is a passage, a contact area. Documenting these places of connection and transition means asking questions and imagining a space in which the paths that intersect become the very form of the film.
All your films, while tied to a specific locale, are informed by global politics. Below The Clouds, among other things, shows the unexpected traces in the city’s fabric of the wars in Syria and Ukraine, for example. Did you consider these links in your original idea for the film, or did it emerge while filming?
Naples and the Vesuvius territory are imbued with the histories of thousands of years: peoples, eruptions, domination. This history continues to live in underground tunnels, museums, buildings. The film tells everyday stories and lives in a time that seems to have little of the ordinary, as the news constantly proves. In a planet that is becoming smaller and smaller, great history is intertwined with the daily events of men and women, generating anxiety, fragility, but also a new awareness.
The present bursts in everywhere: in a port city, for example, you encounter routes of people and goods, events near and far that intertwine. Wars, exploitation, past and present conflicts: filming the present means allowing yourself to be challenged by it all.
Did you encounter George Orwell’s writing before deciding to make a movie about his life and work? Did you read him directly, or had you already absorbed some of his ideas through popular culture, or thinkers working under his influence?
Of course, if you have gone to school, if you have gone to university, then you have to cross paths with George Orwell. That’s obligatory. I grew up in many different countries and in each of them, Orwell is (was) a known commodity. But, politically, there were more important thinkers in my life, especially coming from the Third World. My political focus was rather about the North/South axis and tensions than the West sulking on its own problems. I probably had some suspicion towards Orwell over time. When you talk to people on the left specifically, some had a troubled relationship with his political evolution. He was suspicious. Before I started this project, I talked to two writer friends—both very famous, I won’t name them—and asked them if I should make a movie about George Orwell. One of them is British, a Marxist, still very left wing. The other one is American. One said that I shouldn’t do it, the latter, amused, was looking forward to my take. These are both people with whom I share certain experiences and positions, so it rather energized me. And now, more than ever, I feel very much closer to Orwell’s way of thinking—his autonomy of thinking, outside of any sort of dogma.
Resisting dogma is a major theme of his work, which is why it’s interesting that some critics are dogmatic about him: his politics, his ideology, his affiliations...
Well, everybody has claimed Orwell. And there are many instances that he would have disagreed with. Like the CIA, which put a lot of money into the first film production of Animal Farm. For them, that book and “1984” were perfect propaganda that could be used against the Soviet Union. Even though Orwell did use extensively Stalinism as the central vehicle and inspiration for these books, but he was not strictly referring to what was happening in the communism countries in the east. They were only very potent examples. Orwell’s analysis and criticism was not exclusively towards the East. He was also talking about democracies everywhere on the planet. He was talking as well about England and other European countries. As he wrote: “But to be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.” People tried to fit his work towards their narratives during the Cold War, but they did it using one small part of who he was.
Your film deals with Orwell’s writing and his biography and how the two are linked; the impact of growing up in India and observing imperialism first-hand is significant. The photo of the infant Orwell being held by his Indian nanny is striking and very resonant—you use it to bookend the film, and to draw out a number of different ideas and meanings...
That photo became something of a reckoning for me. I thought: ‘Oh! Orwell is a brother. This is somebody from the Third World!’ If you grow up as a child in the Third World, it changes you and your view of the world. You can ask any “westerner” who grew up in Africa or in India and their view of the world have turned either totally racist or genuinely universal. That was a starting point for me. I was working on my film about Ernest Cole, and there was a sequence where you see these nannies in South Africa—Black nannies taking care of white, blonde children. You understand the absurdity of racism when you see how those white parents would hand the most valuable being in their lives—their child—into the hands of people they totally despise, people who they consider as basically animals. How totally fucked up is that? One of the nannies says in the film: “I love this child, but I know when she grows up she will be just like her mother”. This picture of Orwell with his black nanny connected me with him: he just turns out to be a fine human being. The interpretation of this picture at the beginning of the film differs from the one at the end of the film. It’s the same photo but it means two different things. At first, we see it and think. That fragile child with his black nanny. A uniquely warm, innocent and exotic childhood. And then the second time, at the end of the film, it’s scarier. You think ‘Oh my God... That woman would have every motive to just strangle that child’. There is a sense of unease and panic. It’s as if the whole history of the world hangs on the nanny’s ability to be a correct person, not to violate that trust and that original bond.
The image of Orwell’s birth rhymes with what we know about his death; the disease that rendered him weak and helpless. That feeling manifests in 1984, in the scenes of Winston’s torture and degradation, the way he is infantilized by his tormentors...
I knew from the start that I had to find a human and emotional point of entry to Orwell’s life and work. I had to find his “boiling point”. That point is more often than not the birth of something original, bold, determining to start threading a narrative. I don’t make biographies; I choose a moment in the life of a character that allows me to tell the bigger story. For Orwell, I found that moment quite rapidly. It is the last year of his life. At that time, he pretty much can guess that he doesn’t have much time to live. He's struggling to finish that novel that will make him famous and that he will not even live to see. He died four months after releasing 1984. He will never know the impact of that novel. The dramatic undercurrent of the film tension and dialectic lies on this state of his life between life and death and the struggle of finishing his “last” novel.
Do you feel that you came to understand Orwell as a person as well as thinker while making this film?
I think I did not only understand him as a writer, a thinker, but also as a human being. Without that, I don’t think the film would have made sense to me. Even in terms of how I see the world today, this understanding was key.
At the end of 1984, Winston mentions the proles, which is not just the proletariat—it’s something bigger. It’s the whole planet, including the “Third World”. And I am trying to reclaim Orwell for that third world, for my side of the world. Just as I cannot make a movie about a writer or a thinker whom I do not fundamentally understand and whose work I respect. I did films about James Baldwin, Karl Marx, Patrice Lumumba—people I understood profoundly. I knew their fight, their conflicts, their demons even that fueled their bold and unique undertaking. With Orwell, it was the first time I was going into a film without a deep personal connection to the subject, but I was able to find my bearings very early on. As soon as I re-read this incredible and lesser-known essay entitled “Why I Write,” I knew I was there.
You quote more extensively from “Why I Write” in your film than any other piece—more than 1984, even.
That text is him. It’s all of him, it’s a confession. It’s an act of contrition. He’s not hiding anything, “...I was part of the actual machinery of despotism”, having “bullied” the natives and even hanged a few, his despise of his own social class and the classes above, the hardship of imposed poverty in London and Paris, to experience “reality”, etc. You see the man, with all of his flaws. It’s not a lecture; it’s about putting a mirror up to his own face. That idea of the mirror—that’s something else I want people to understand. I have a lot of trouble every time I hear columnists talk about “dystopia” or calling him a “prophet.” He was of course not a prophet. He was talking about the world around him. It’s not a projection, it’s an analysis. He’s working through it all: what he went through in British Imperium; what he went through in the Spanish Civil War, what he experienced in England, in Paris etc. He’s analyzing the early days of the Cold War. It’s not prophecy. It’s the world as it is, as he was living it.
What do you think differentiates Orwell’s analysis from later generations of writers?
The way I see it is this: in the 1970s, most serious writers needed to have a tremendous amount of general knowledge—about poetry, about history, about culture, geography etc... It was not as much about their inner lives or “feelings”. Inner life was the fuel, the Zeitgeist they used it to power the rest.
The recent decades, through what we could call a “democratization” of culture, and concurrently the focalization toward “the inner self”, almost anybody is entitled to write. Any experience is allowed to be printed and commercialized. You don't need the more general deeper knowledge of the universe above you nor the idea of the “collective “. You no longer must refer to the world around you. You ARE the world (or it revolves around you, personally, intimately).
We have lost the collective mind. We have lost the collective fight. I can see it in the generation after me. Nobody thinks about death the same way today, about risking one’s life for a cause. When I was studying in Berlin, I knew that I was going to go back to Haiti and die. My friends from South Africa, they knew they were going to go back to South Africa and die. My Iranian friends knew it, my Nicaraguan friends, my Brazilian friends, my Chilean friends. We all knew.
We didn’t talk about personal faith so much or about personal struggles or feelings (Not that it was a good thing. On the contrary. But it was just not proper). When the Berlin Wall fell, there was no stopping of the exuberant capitalism cries of victory. Capital had won. And so everything else that came with it. It was a complicated world, and we needed writers with a wealth of universal knowledge who could help us understand the moment beyond the allegorical Fukuyama’s “End of History”. But on the contrary, we went for full blown fragmentation, specialization, and individualism, inner soul and self-wellness among other developments. And this is in every field of all society, media, academia, politics. We lost the collective, the overall analysis. Everybody focused just on what they could chew and got lost in petty details.
In some ways, the right wing—at least in the West—has done a better job capturing the collective imagination, in politics and in popular culture as well.
It is always easier for those forces because they don’t have to care about the multitudes, nor about the truth or the nuances. They just have to care about their profits.
Capital not only has no frontier, but also tends to control politics, through different tools and procedures. To a point where any powerful president, at least in western democracies, merely has a negotiation power. We can see how President Obama, besides having inherited one of the major capitalistic crises in history, still was under the sway of the Wall Street power brokers. Every move or economic decision was the result of heavy discussion and compromise, in which more than once, banks and industry well-being were privileged over citizen interests.
Authoritarian regimes operate with less moral qualms and restraints.
The ending of A Face in the Crowd comes to mind — except that instead of being exposed by the television cameras, authoritarian leaders are emboldened by them.
There is no limit. If you just let it go on there is no ending.
In Germany in the 1930s, Hitler took at least six, seven years to become Hitler. The establishment thought that they would “control” him at the end. He had written out what he was going to do in Mein Kampf. And nobody took that seriously. It’s the same with Project 2025. At what point do you start to take warnings seriously? Bullies, authoritarians—they have no limit. It will get worse and worse until they are stopped. It's not right against left now. It’s an authoritarian regime. It’s Big Brother. It’s the same with authoritarian playbooks today, in many countries. The names change; the goals don’t. They target institutions, courts, media, civil society. They follow the same script as abusers: isolate, humiliate, intimidate. They’re predators. And unless stopped, they escalate.
I grew up in many different dictatorships. Whether it was Haiti, or whether it was the Congo... we could feel early on when something was going wrong. It’s when people cannot speak their minds anymore, when you must think twice before saying things in public, or addressing certain topics. That’s what dictatorship is. It’s little by little.
Did you know at the beginning how much contemporary politics in general—would be threaded through your portrait of Orwell?
That all came very quickly when I went through “Why I Write.” I wrote a one-page summary for our investors, and the film was all there right from the gate. Except that I didn’t realize at first that it would go so deep and dark and morph so close to our reality. When the project was proposed to Alex Gibney and then myself —we knew that we couldn’t say no: we were being offered access to everything Orwell had written. The same access I had gotten with James Baldwin’s body of work, who, as I said, was closer to home for me. When you have that kind of access and you don’t make a great film, you’re in the wrong line of work. With Orwell, it was also a once in a lifetime opportunity. What I knew I needed to find was the connection to the world I’m living in, and that’s what I mean when I say Orwell is a “brother”. He saw the world in a way I can relate to. I had my share of Big Brothers throughout my life. In my youth, the U.S. was supporting dictatorships in Haiti, killing Lumumba in the Congo and staging numerous coups in foreign countries. And Newspeak was always part of my reality. When they say “democracy”, it was never meant for the likes of me. I grew up with Newspeak. I grew up with Big Brother. In the Third World, we all grew up in the shadow of Big Brother.
The language of euphemism is another major subject in the movie; it’s the language of corporations, a sort of airbrushing of agendas, the rhetoric of hard-sell advertising.
It's corporate, it’s political, it’s military. All of it. As a Black person, my life is about deconstruction. Why do we deconstruct? Because we know that what we are seeing is not our reality. We grew up deconstructing Hollywood films because we knew that when we were seeing Indians being killed by cowboys, that they were us. To enjoy the film, we had to deconstruct it, to make it accessible (or acceptable) to us. The ironies and contradictions were obvious. Hollywood was never a “dream” for us. We grew up with that dichotomy. The movies were Newspeak.
Because American movies are so big and expensive they can be hard to deconstruct. They’re made to be solid, to be impenetrable. They’re weapons of soft power.
That power was never totally “soft” for us. The traces linger for very long. Soft power is never innocent. If you live in the West, there’s no need to deconstruct that power. That's the privilege that you have: you don't have to. Elsewhere, if you don’t deconstruct that power, it will kill you. For a more profound and definitive analysis of this, and way more eloquent than me, I would recommend The Devil Finds Work from James Baldwin. That’s what James Baldwin said about Hollywood in The Devil Finds Work.
Baldwin’s profile has been raised in the years since your documentary. There were two different movies this year—Eddington and Sorry, Baby—that used him as a reference or a signifier, and of course there was Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk.
Yes, Baldwin is back, baby! As he should be. And I am glad that a whole new generation is reappropriating his work anew.
When Barry Jenkins made Beale Street he invented a new genre, a new way for black actors to work and play their parts. I have worked with black actors for forty-five years, and I can see how Beale Street was a successful attempt to propose something new, that is not a cliché. American movies reproduce cliches over cliches over cliches, sometimes ironically, sometimes not. [Jenkins] succeeded in finding a new way for actors to show emotions, to show pain, to show joy, to show love.
Is it fair to say that more movie critics have read Orwell than Baldwin?
By the sheer mathematical reality, it is evidently true. But I'm not sure that many more now have read Baldwin, if it is only to keep up with the flow.
That being said, I am sure most know about Orwell as “the prophet” rather than somebody who is actually writing about the real world. The thing about Orwell is : everything he wrote, he went through himself. The editing of the movie tries to reflect that. We can see how the physical reality of his illness—his tuberculosis—finds its echo in the rendering of Winston in 1984, where the motif of the ‘lungs’ recurs throughout. We can also observe how Orwell’s own complicated behavior with women is mirrored in the strange, often uneasy and sometimes disturbing dynamics of Winston’s short-lived and tragic relationship with Julia (‘Do it to Julia, not me!’).”
He could be an awkward man in real life. He was awkward with women. With his last wife, Sonia Brownell, he asked to marry just a few months later after meeting her although his health was already severely impaired. I can hardly believe that he was even in love. His work was his life story. He could only write about things he went through. If you read 1984 as a prophecy, you will really miss out on Orwell's essence.
There’s something adolescent about Orwell: a sense of idealism that never faded as he grew older. It’s also palpable because he had such a short life.
The adolescence you’re talking about is only possible in the West. Because you can afford to be a fully grown adolescent in the West. Orwell, protected himself from that delusion through humor, sometimes even through cynicism and wit. His distinctly British sense of distance probably saved him from despair. Because he “knew” and could not “unknow” what he had seen.
How did you go about organizing the material in the film?
My job is to find a way to make a movie that’s accessible for everybody, not just for literary savvy people. We read everything—everything that Orwell wrote and then I started to make selections from the text. I knew that I had to come up with a sort of libretto, the same way I did for James Baldwin. Making a film is obviously not like writing a book. It’s closer to the way you might write an opera, except that you’re using somebody else’s words. Orwell’s words are strong. I have to be careful though to not twist his words. My work on Baldwin did help me a lot. His humanity was closer to me and easier to handle. Orwell is more... British. You have to find the emotion in it. We took a lot from “Why I Write” because it’s more sincere, human and direct— both about himself and about the society he is writing about. It's perfect material for a voice-over.
The movie includes footage of the war in Ukraine and Gaza; these are very charged images to put in a movie about a writer who died seventy-five years ago.
I’ve been making films for 40 years. All of the movies I’ve made are about alarming people to the state of the world. I’ve never made a film that I didn’t totally believe in. And making 2+2=5 was basically like watching the news. For example, I was re-reading 1984. At the very beginning, Winston is writing his journal: “April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films...”. Then he basically described how the coast guards are bombarding a boat full of refugees in the middle of the Mediterranean. Sounds familiar? This gives you the chills. You basically just saw that in the Evening News! Orwell is exactly what’s happening now. Even the audience’s reaction, us, sounds so familiar: We don’t care. Every day boats are sinking. Nobody stops it.
The Zone of Interest comes to mind—that vision of compartmentalization, of living adjacent to suffering.
I lived like that in Germany for fifteen years, in that state of mind. I talked about it in Exterminate All the Brutes. I’m Black, not Jewish, but the Holocaust was also my reality. I did my film school essay at Plötzensee, a Nazi torture chamber in the middle of Berlin. There is that phrase “never again.” People see it as a philosophical sentence, barely a warning nowadays. How many people repeated “never again” again, and again, and again. The same countries that were the “liberators” do this everywhere else. It takes different forms, but you know, it’s the same.
I’ve done several films about genocide, so this is not new to me. Orwell is just the latest one. People need to look at their reality. Consumerism has overcome the West while the rest of the world is looking. They know it’s all an illusion. That you are in a sort of a bubble.
There are refugees on every corner in Paris today, or in other European capitals, where people are just being pushed from one corner to another. Just wait for the next Alcatraz city. Yet, they are the ones doing most of the “second front” to use a covid popular term. Delivering food every day, working at meat factories, taking care of the elders, etc... they were dying by the hundreds during COVID. That’s the part of the world that’s watching the “opulent” West (of course we know that it’s not opulent for everybody). I doubt that they still believe in all those well-meaning words, like democracy, justice, human rights, etc.
In the film, you quote the end of 1984, the idea of a faint hope in the darkness. Do you think that hope is real? Or is it just another platitude?
There cannot be hope without understanding. Marx wrote the same thing: you can’t push people to the barricades if they don’t know what they’re fighting for, if they don’t understand the whole system and why it is making them miserable. You can go to the barricade and burn down everything out of anger, and then what do you do after that? You still have to rebuild something. It can’t just be Christian hope—the hope that “it’s going to get better.”
Maybe it’s not hope we need; maybe we need reality. We need to cease just being consumers. We even consume democracy! We choose for whom to vote like we choose a soap bar. “Let’s try this one this time.” It’s consumerism.
What I know for sure, history doesn't function with “hope”. If you want change, you need to act upon it. If we just stare, it will just be somebody else’s plan.
There are people who really do believe that 2+2=5, of course. And others who may not believe it, but find it easier to say it.
Some people may believe that, but I don’t need to indulge in their craziness. In the beginning of the film, there is a clip of Orwell with his son Richard as he advises him: “always know that two and two are four.” Some people will tell you that two and two are five. They are called governments... big corporations. ...They will torture you... they will bribe you... etc...”
In hard times, we need to have the courage to say that: “Two and two equals four”
That’s what the film is about.
Winner of the Grand Prix at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival for Oldboy, winner of the Cannes Special Jury Prize in 2009 for Thirst, invited to the Main Competition in 2016 with The Handmaiden, and winner of the Best Director Award at Cannes in 2022 with Decision to Leave… Master director Park Chan-wook, who has captivated audiences with his taboo- breaking plots and finely rendered mise-en-scène, is back. With No Other Choice – a story he has long wanted to tell– he presents a film that is completely different from his previous works.
No Other Choice is the story of Man-su, an employee at a paper company who is so satisfied with his life that he can truthfully say to himself, “I’ve got it all.” However, after suddenly being fired, he finds himself in a battle to get re-hired in order to keep the family home he has worked so hard to buy, and to protect his wife and two children. No Other Choice depicts, through the unique perspective of director PARK Chan wook, how an ordinary person tries to overcome the crisis of being suddenly fired and draws deep empathy from the audience through its realistic situations that anyone in modern times could go through. As Man-su faces increasingly cutthroat competition to be re-hired, he comes to consider resorting to extreme measures. The inner conflict he experiences pulls the audience into a tense and unpredictable narrative.
Director Park Chan-wook’s sharp sense of ironic humor instills the distinctive appeal in No Other Choice. The film has an attractive cast of characters that add richness to the drama, including Miri, the strong wife who finds herself facing a crisis; Sun-chul, line manager at the highly successful Moon Paper, Man-su’s aspiration; Bummo and Sijo, job seekers who compete with Man-su for open positions; and Bummo’s wife Ara. With dramatic developments that oscillate between tension and release, sensuous mise-en- scène and meticulous directing, added with black comedy, No Other Choice is a truly original film that will captivate audiences in Korea and around the world
Official Toronto International Film Festival selection Forastera has debuted a poster ahead of the film's world premiere. The movie marks the first feature film from writer and director Lucia Aleńar Iglesias. Forastera marks an assured drama that audiences will soon not forget.
