“You know, we Finns drink too much, like in many countries, but we are quite famous in that. And I sort of wanted to tell a story which is like a drinking story that it starts, it’s very funny. And at some point you realize that it’s not fun at all.”
“I think it all began with just the idea of covering three generations of one family, to show kind of the passage of trauma and to really explore this collective trauma [of 1948] that we Palestinians call theNakba. And that idea really came from me observing my own family.”
“Soledad Deza is a very generous person. She was very open with me all the time, in every part of the process, like the script. She’s an easy person to be with, which made it very easy for me to — how to say? — feel her energy, to create a merger between her personality and mine. The character is a mix between her and me.”
“I just felt like it was too tragic to put in a movie. But even as I felt like my head was saying no, I couldn’t stop thinking about this story. I felt like this is not just a story about this terrible mistake, it’s something much deeper. It’s about what it means to be human.”
“Well, I didn’t want to make the diagnosis of Franz Kafka, but yeah, somehow some of his behavior, some of his problems he had with society and with connection with other people, it showed that he was in some way on the spectrum.”
“I think we shot our second draft, which is crazy. I wouldn’t recommend anyone do that, but it was kind of cool. … It was a tiny film; we shot it on $200,000. The spirit of the crew and cast was really what carried us and what carried the film.”
“People had this impression of Hong Kong films being about action, kung fu, and all that. But really, the topic I’ve dealt with is actually much more of a global trend.”
“It’s like, very intentionally, hospitals are understaffed to make more profit. This just kept brewing and simmering in me and I felt it was a really important topic to look at from a filmmaker’s perspective, also a feminist perspective and a political perspective.”
“In the first row [of the church], I remember seeing three priests sitting there who were really enjoying the performance. For me, it was a very contradictory image – these men in celibacy versus hearing these voices so open. I knew there was something I had to explore deeper.”
“I think that when you tell the story through the eyes of children in general, you play way more with the emotions and not with such a constructed world. Because when we are adults, we are exposed to so many things, so many dark things and luminous things, but we get a lot of prejudices…”
“After reading the screenplay, the first question that Lee asked me was, ‘Can it be funny?’ My response was, ‘The funnier the better — you can make it as comedic as you want.’ And after that, like playing a game of ping pong, we would throw a funny idea at each other, then we would develop it further on our own, and throw it back at the other person.”
“Stories have identity, have DNAs, have roots. And this story was very much rooted in the marshes of Iraq, in the south of Iraq, in Baghdad. … I also wanted to break this stigma about Iraq, which is perceived in a very certain way in people’s minds.”
“When I read the script, I was so impressed by the quiet humanity of the story. And I remember running back to the first page, checking if the writer really was Israeli or was Palestinian…”
