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Q&A with Paul Schrader and Tiffany Haddish

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of The Card Counter.

Can you talk about finding this character, before you brought him to the page?

Paul Schrader: These kinds of stories — I’ve done about a half-dozen of them, stretching all the way back to Taxi Driver — usually come about when there’s a metaphor. Often, in my case, it’s an occupational metaphor. And then there is a personal or societal problem that starts to line up with that metaphor. And it’s not a predictable alignment. As I was saying before, when Taxi Driver came out, people thought of him as some kind of garrulous best friend at a movie, whereas I saw him in the tradition of European existential fiction… as the black heart of existentialism! So when you take the taxi driver and put him in that situation, you get interesting results. In this case, I was thinking about professional card players, looking at them on television… and thinking to myself, “wow, that’s a peculiar occupation.” Because these guys play ten to twelve hours a day. And for the most part, they’re just running numbers: odds, probabilities. And, you know, what’s attractive about that occupation? I saw it as a kind of metaphor for a half-life. These people who sit in front of slot machines. It’s a kind of purgatory between life and non-life. And I thought that was an interesting occupational metaphor. Then I started trying to align it with a problem, and I had been thinking about how much personal responsibility we’ve lost in the modern world. You know… “I didn’t lie; I ‘misspoke.’ ” Or, “I didn’t touch her inappropriately… I ‘made a bad choice.’ ” There’s always an excuse now. Whereas in the tradition I was raised in — Dutch Calvinism — you were born in a sea of guilt, and you only got guiltier. And you were totally responsible, not only for yourself but you were responsible for everybody else, too. So I said to myself, “what if a character from my background got put in that situation, where he feels that he hasn’t paid his debt… even though the government says he has? And what does he do, at that point, to wait? Because he has to wait— wait for something to happen. So he’s waiting— by playing cards. And then the next step was, thinking about, well, what could he have done that is so unforgivable (to himself)? Could he be a serial killer? Torturer of animals? Or…? And then my mind went to Abu Ghraib. And I thought, “now that is pretty close to unforgivable.” Because it’s not so much something you did, as it is a stain on your nation. Because it will outlive you, and it will outlive all the other people involved. So then I had a kind of societal problem, and a very nice metaphor… and you start bringing them together, and at a certain point, sparks either fly or they don’t.

wherever there are people, she’s going to be watching

What did the location do for you, in terms of preparing this character?

Tiffany Haddish: I think this character could have been in any casino, anywhere. I feel like casinos are sad kinds of places where people go to find luck… but they’re not the luckiest kinds of places. I think she’s, you know— she watches people. She’s a people-watcher, and she’s looking for opportunity. So wherever there are people, she’s going to be watching. And she’s dealing in the world of poker, and gambling, so of course she’s going to be in a casino. But I feel like she could do what she does anywhere. She could have been a pimp, for instance.

The military scenes are remarkable. How did you incorporate those into the film?

PS: I didn’t have the budget or the time to do full justice to Abu Ghraib. I didn’t have the Zero Dark Thirty kind of money. So I had to come up with something that was much more impressionistic. And the 6.5mm lens has a kind of VR feel to it: the only thing that lens doesn’t see is the camera operator. It sees the ceiling, it sees the floor, it sees the walls to the side. And the real Abu Ghraib doesn’t look like that. It’s just a warehouse. But we made it look like a maze. And you’re wandering through it, as the audience member. I didn’t want viewers to say, “well, that’s a kind of tacky version of Abu Ghraib.” I wanted them to realize that what they’re seeing is not Abu Ghraib at all; it’s the Abu Ghraib that lives inside his mind. So that was the thinking behind that. And also because that lens is so wide… if an actor is in a closeup, the lens is literally two inches away from the lens. If he’s talking to someone else, the other person he’s talking to is off-camera. So that meant we had to do the character interactions in one take, which is good for me, because you just rehearse and rehearse and do it one take and you don’t waste the rest of the day doing coverage.

How did the comedic elements of the character overlap with the dramatic elements?

TH: I guess I just had to… I guess turn the “stage Tiffany” off, and the “real Tiffany” on. In any conversation you do things to ease it along: You crack a little joke here and there to have that camaraderie, for people to feel comfortable. But it’s not necessarily as big as I normally would like to do! Like, when I do what I do. And so that’s where the difference was. Actually… can I tell you something? Ok, so… comedy is way harder to do. Being funny? You’re tickling people’s souls and you’re getting them to come along. And this was… it was easy-hard. Easy because, well, you just need to be still and be present. Hard because I get bored easily! And I’m used to, like, using my hands and using my body… but for this character, I didn’t have to do that. And that’s what Paul helped me realize: just be there.

Q&A with Stanley Nelson, Traci A. Curry and Arthur Harrison

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Attica.

In my view, this film tells a story of oppression that many people don’t want to hear. This film has been in the works for many years, can you talk about its development?

Stanley Nelson: I was about twenty years old when Attica happened, and living in New York. Like most of the country, I was transfixed listening to what was happening day to day and then heartbroken and devastated by the end. When I became a filmmaker, I felt that there was a story that hadn’t been told and had so much more to tell us. I’ve wanted to make this film for over fifteen years, but have been thinking about it for more like forty years. A couple of years ago with the proliferation of cable channels and different streamers, we thought that it was the time. We were able to raise a little money and create a trailer, a little five-minute piece, and Showtime bought in. At that point it was all systems go.

Traci A. Curry: Then Stanley asked me if I was interested in working on the film, and I didn’t know too much about Attica except for the basics. But I knew the film would get involved with ideas of justice, human rights, the prison system, and the way that all of those things are wrapped up with power and race and class and the themes I’m always interested in exploring. It was really exciting to have the opportunity to dig deeper into the story.

We wanted to be treated like human beings.

What were the challenges in finding people to speak to you and the levels of interest?

SN: When we started making the film, out of the former prisoners that were alive, there were many of them that were pretty young when it happened. It happened fifty years ago, so there should be a number of them that we could find, that would be seventy or seventy-five years old. That was the thought going in. But I’ll let Traci talk about the nuts and bolts of actually getting people involved.

TC: My goal was to get every single person that was still surviving that was there when it happened and who could talk about it from personal experience. We went about that in a variety of different ways and had some terrific advisors. Then it was a matter of going through records. There were years of litigation after the re-taking of the prison and all of that is public record. Many of the men—Mr. Harrison, as well as others—were on record having told their stories in court when the settlements happened. Some of it was reading through those hundreds of pages of documents, figuring out who might still be around, who might still have a story to tell. People who were of an age at that time meant that it was likely they’d still be around. Then it became the work of tracking those folks down. Picking up the phone and calling someone out of the blue to ask them to recount this horrific and traumatic event to a complete stranger… maybe Mr. Harrison can jump in to explain what that was like. But I did understand going into this that it was a profound trauma for a lot of these people and that it’s no small thing to be cold-called and be asked to recount that experience, especially with no idea of what they’re going to do with that slice of your life in their story.

Arthur Harrison: At first I was reluctant and didn’t want to be involved because after all these years, until the young lady called me, there was no one concerned about what happened to all the other brothers up in Attica. When I say brothers, I mean Black, Hispanic, White… it was everybody. We had become of one. We wanted to be treated like human beings.  When the young sister called, I said, well she’s too young to really understand about what’s been going on. I spoke to her a few times to feel her out, and then she called back again, so I could tell she was really interested in doing this. Most of my life, I’ve been a fighter, a trained fighter, so this is my way of fighting back. In that event at Attica, we couldn’t fight back. We didn’t have the opportunity to fight back. As a kid, I was always taught not to show signs of weakness, like tears or crying. We men weren’t supposed to do that; that’s the way I was trained because I was in the system quite a few times as a young kid. This brother and this sister worked magic because what I saw last night at the screening was real. This was like therapy for me, because I don’t know of too many brothers that got into real therapy… they gave me parole but they never sent me to a psychiatrist to get help for the trauma. All these years I’ve been carrying this baggage. Brother Nelson and this young sister here have given brothers like myself the opportunity to vent and give our version about what happened.

So Mr. Harrison, was last night the first time you saw the completed film?

AH: The full completed film, yes. What really hit me in the core was when they had all the brothers naked. It reminded me of movies I used to watch that had guys being shipped over here from Africa. That’s the same type thing, like slavery all over again. I always used to look at prisons like that. Jewish people would call them concentration camps, and I call them plantations. I still see them like that—even more so now—because I’ve been through this hell called Attica. I’m here today to speak for the brothers who can’t speak for themselves, like LD Barkley, who spoke so brilliantly inside Attica about what occurred. My last moment of seeing LD was being dragged through the yard of Attica, asking not to be hurt. We heard gunshots, and I then didn’t hear LD’s voice anymore. More than likely, that was the time they took his life. Because he spoke out, and he spoke up. But all LD was talking about was anyone who had any mindset of wanting to be treated like a human being. And they took his life for that reason.

This idea of these people not being treated like human beings really comes through in the film. As filmmakers, how did you keep that as the focus?

TC: I think in some ways, the style of the film followed the substance. What I mean by that is whenever you’re doing this historical storytelling, the instinct is to set up the context, and get some talking head experts to tell us what it is that we’re seeing instead of letting the story unfold by itself. Initially we played around with some ideas like that… let’s talk about the environment outside the prison and what was happening in the world, since it was during Vietnam. What became apparent as we began to move through the process of doing the interviews with the prisoners and also with the families of the guards, is that there was nothing stronger or more compelling than their own voices. That naturally lent itself to creating a film that allowed those voices to shine through, and it’s right on screen. Really, our job was to get out of the way and give them the space and the time to tell the story as they lived it and as they experienced it, and the end result is what you see there in the film.

SN: As Traci said, the humanity of the former prisoners that we interviewed just shines through and you can’t deny it. By listening to them talk, you get an insight into their personalities… one guy is funny, one guy is thoughtful, and they’re all human beings. One of the weirdest questions that I’ve been asked by one journalist was “why didn’t you put in there what crimes they committed,” and my answer to that is that it’s not relevant to the film. That’s not the point. As people say over and over again in the film, the point was that they should be treated like human beings regardless of what they were in there for. In some cases, their demands were really small, like to be given toilet paper, visiting rights, rights to call home. Small things. They were just demanding to be treated like human beings. And they deserved to be treated like human beings.

THE NATIONAL BOARD OF REVIEW WILL HOST AWARDS GALA ON TUESDAY, MARCH 15, 2022

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Annual Gala will Celebrate the 2021 National Board of Review Honorees

New York, NY (January 20, 2022) – The National Board of Review has announced that their 2022 Awards Gala will now be held on Tuesday, March 15, 2022 in New York City. 

The 2021 awards continue the NBR’s tradition of recognizing excellence in filmmaking, which was established in 1909.  This year 221 films were viewed by a select group of film enthusiasts, filmmakers, young professionals, academics, and students, many of which were followed by in-depth discussions with directors, actors, producers, and screenwriters. Voting ballots were tabulated by the accounting firm of Lutz & Carr, LLP.  

The National Board of Review’s awards celebrate the art of cinema, with categories that include Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Actress, Best Original and Adapted Screenplay, Breakthrough Performance, and Directorial Debut, as well as their signature honors the Freedom of Expression Award and Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography.

To request credentials to the evening’s red carpet, please fill out a credential application here by Friday, March 11, 2022.

Below is a full list of the 2021 award recipients, announced by the National Board of Review:

Best Film:  LICORICE PIZZA
Best Director:  Paul Thomas Anderson, LICORICE PIZZA
Best Actor:  Will Smith, KING RICHARD
Best Actress: Rachel Zegler, WEST SIDE STORY
Best Supporting Actor: Ciarán Hinds, BELFAST
Best Supporting Actress:  Aunjanue Ellis, KING RICHARD
Best Original Screenplay: Asghar Farhadi, A HERO
Best Adapted Screenplay: Joel Coen, THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH
Breakthrough Performance: Alana Haim & Cooper Hoffman, LICORICE PIZZA
Best Directorial Debut:  Michael Sarnoski, PIG  
Best Animated Feature:  ENCANTO
Best Foreign Language Film: A HERO
Best Documentary: SUMMER OF SOUL (…OR, WHEN THE REVOLUTION COULD NOT BE TELEVISED) 
Best Ensemble: THE HARDER THEY FALL 
Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography: Bruno Delbonnel, THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH
NBR Freedom of Expression Award:  FLEE

Top Films (in alphabetical order)
Belfast
Don’t Look Up
Dune
King Richard
The Last Duel   
Nightmare Alley
Red Rocket
The Tragedy of Macbeth
West Side Story

Top 5 Foreign Language Films (in alphabetical order)
Benedetta
Lamb
Lingui, The Sacred Bonds  
Titane
The Worst Person in the World

Top 5 Documentaries (in alphabetical order)
Ascension
Attica
Flee
The Rescue
Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain

Top 10 Independent Films (in alphabetical order)
The Card Counter
C’mon C’mon  
CODA
The Green Knight
Holler
Jockey
Old Henry
Pig
Shiva Baby
The Souvenir Part II

ABOUT THE NATIONAL BOARD OF REVIEW
Since 1909, the National Board of Review has dedicated its efforts to the support of cinema as both art and entertainment. Each year, this select group of film enthusiasts, filmmakers, professionals and academics of varying ages and backgrounds watches over 250 films and participates in illuminating discussions with directors, actors, producers and screenwriters before announcing their selections for the best work of the year.  Since first citing year-end cinematic achievements in 1929, NBR has recognized a vast selection of outstanding studio, independent, foreign-language, animated and documentary films, often propelling recipients such as Peter Farrelly’s Green Book and George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road into the larger awards conversation. NBR also stands out as the only film organization that bestows a film history award in honor of former member and film historian William K. Everson. In addition, one of the organization’s core values is identifying new talent and nurturing young filmmakers by awarding promising talent with ‘Directorial Debut’ and ‘Breakthrough Actor’ awards as well as grants to rising film students and by facilitating community outreach through the support of organizations such as The Ghetto Film School, Reel Works Teen Filmmaking, and Educational Video Center. With its continued efforts to assist up-and-coming artists in completing and presenting their work, NBR honors its commitment to not just identifying the best that current cinema has to offer, but also ensuring the quality of films for future generations to come.

Join the conversation @NBRfilm

# # #

Press Contacts:  
Andy Gelb / Shawn Purdy/ Lindsey Brown
SLATE PR – (212) 235-6813
andy@slate-pr.com / shawn@slate-pr.com / lindsey@slate-pr.com

Q&A with Jeymes Samuel and Zazie Beetz

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of The Harder They Fall.

Can you talk about the germination of this idea, for you?

Jeymes Samuel: The film has been in my head since I was a kid. You know, just growing up and loving Westerns. A lot of people say they don’t like Westerns, or think they don’t like them. But it doesn’t even make sense: A “Western” just means a time and place that the movie is set, right? Really we just like stories. And I always loved everything about stories set in that time and place— from the gold and sand on the ground to the swinging doors of the saloon, to the horses… little things, like the cowboy ordering and the bartender just sliding the drink down the bar. I don’t know if that ever happened in real life, but it’s just such a beautiful thing to see. And then, you know, the older you get — and when I say “the older you get,” I mean, like, when you turn twelve or so — you start looking at things a bit differently. You start looking for yourself on the screen, or people that resemble things that are somehow related to you. You know… like, a mother figure: you start looking for women with substance… that aren’t “working women of the night.” You start looking for people of color that aren’t being abused all the time and treated as less-than-human. You start looking at things that resemble life as you know it. And when I started doing that, I couldn’t find them! I couldn’t find them in Westerns. They were always white male-centric. If you were a woman character, or a character of any color other than white, you were treated as a third-class citizen. Or you were subservient to some kind of male plot. If you were a person of color, you were treated as less than human. If you were black, they’ll always give a reference to some slave background… and it just didn’t make sense to me. I got to be about thirteen or fourteen and I started going to the library and I started reading more on this time and place that I loved so much, but I didn’t find representation of me on the screen. And I found all these amazing characters in my reading, like Rufus Buck, Cherokee Bill… Stagecoach Mary, Bill Pickett, Bass Reeves (the inspiration for the original Lone Ranger)… just all of this amazing stuff, this amazing history of America. And you’d learn things: Wyatt Earp died in 1929. My grandmother was alive when Wyatt Earp died! She was born in 1927. But Wyatt Earp died in 1929. The gunfight at the O.K. Corral (Tombstone), didn’t even happen at the O.K. Corral! And it took place in 1881, decades after slavery. So it gets you thinking and just researching more: You find out that one in four cowboys were Black; the term “cowboy” only applied to Black people, white people were called “cowhands.” Just all these types of things. So for me… it just made me really excited to see this stuff portrayed in a Western in a way that I never really saw it before. Just all the way through. And about fifteen years ago, I remember speaking to Idris [Elba] in London: “Hey man, I’m gonna do a Western. All Black people in the cast. I’m going to do a Western with all of these characters…” And we’d just talk about it every so often. And he knew that was my passion. For me, there was no version of this movie with Idris not attached. And then about ten years ago, I embarked on it: Ok, I’m making this film. I started with a short film called “They Die by Dawn,” and that was like a proof of concept. Not necessarily to me, but to the world, to show that we existed. And afterwards, it took maybe about another eight years, nine years, to get to a place where, OK: there’s a studio onboard. Netflix. I had a great team. I had all the tools in my arsenal to go make a great movie. And Idris being there as well. So that was just amazing, and a real gift.

These people actually steal scenes like train robbers

What did you see in the script that made you want to do this movie?

Zazie Beetz: What I like about the script is that it feels like it’s sort of this heightened world, but the acting is super grounded. I think the stakes are all very real, and they give everyone something to chew on and digest. And then when I connected with Jeymes about the story, I felt like he had this very clear vision of the kind of movie he wanted to make, of how it was going to sound and feel, and a clear idea of the reason he was doing it. It was just a very… I don’t know, I feel like anyone who speaks with him can feel his passion, and can feel, you know, that this movie is a cultural phenomenon aimed at changing the traditional narrative around Westerns and also at adding this kind of modern edge to it. And I like revisiting this genre and doing something a little bit different with it. And so, yeah, I just felt very inspired by Jeymes, I felt very inspired by this story, and by the opportunity I had with this character as a lover, and also as an independent woman. And then, obviously, the team already attached was very enticing, and I wanted to work with these people!

Can you talk about writing and casting the part of Cherokee Bill?

JS: Writing the character of Cherokee Bill was incredibly fun! It was just really, really fun. He’s interesting, in the way that he delivers dialog. It’s playful. He’s just really playful. But he is one of the only characters in the movie that repudiates violence. He doesn’t like violence: Every single confrontation he has in the film, he’s telling his opposition, “we’re not here for violence.” But you’re in the presence of extremely violent individuals. Contrary to how it may seem, we don’t like violence. Why does there always have to be one hero? He warns the guy on the train. He warns Jim Beckwourth. He told Bill Pickett, “you had a choice; you chose to stay.” So that contrast in character… you know in real life, Cherokee Bill was a badass. When he was going to his own hanging, they asked him, “any last words?” He said, “I came here to die… not make a speech.” This dude was one of a kind. So to put those things in there… the genius, but to also put this moral compass on him. “When push comes to shove, it’s not about who is quick and who is slow. It’s about who is alive, and who is dead.” And he says these things. So to get LaKeith Stanfield for that character, to have him read it and agree to do it… I was ecstatic! This is going to be haaaard. Hard meaning dope. Dope meaning, real, real good. I knew it was going to be wicked. All of the cast… every one of them, was just so exciting to have involved. I just knew. Even the cast that were relatively unknown on a broad scale, but who were absolutely amazing and as good as anyone else: RJ Cyler, Danielle Deadwyler. These people actually steal scenes like train robbers. It was just amazing, the whole casting process.

How did you work out your scenes with Regina King?

ZB: Yeah! We have this big fight scene that was being shot— I think it was her last couple of days on-set. And at that point, I think because of COVID, things kept getting moved around, and changed at the last moment. And that scene I think was originally meant to shoot weeks before, but then we had gotten shut down multiple times. And so Regina and I were really intent on making sure we found time to rehearse it, because… honestly, by the end of the shoot — and Jeymes can attest to this — I feel like everyday we were asking ourselves, “are we going to get shut down today? Or not?” And… that was sort of stressful! Because you wanted to do your work, and you were preparing for one thing, and then all of a sudden you had to completely change around. And so Regina and I were like, “Ok, you know… production is trying to figure out this scheduling; we’re just going to do our thing.” And so me, her, and our two stunt-doubles sort of planned on our own. We would just kind of meet up at the hotel where all the extras were staying. We would just find a conference room there, and rehearse! It’s really like a dance: even though the fight looks, I think, kind of raw and messy (which is sort of the point), it’s very carefully choreographed. There are a lot of moving parts, and we wanted to trust each other. I feel like we really solidified our connection by doing that together.

Q&A with Jonas Poher Rasmussen

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Flee.


How long have you known Amin? What was it like to hear the truth about his background?

Jonas Poher Rasmussen: I’ve known him for twenty-five years. I grew up in this very small village in Denmark, with like 400 people in it. One day, Amin showed up and stayed with a family around the corner from where I lived. We met every morning on the bus on the way to high school and became very good friends. And of course I was curious, even back then, about how and why he’d gotten there, but he hadn’t wanted to talk about it. When you grow up in a such a small village, the ones that are your age become your best friends because those are the ones you hang out with. Our friendship grew from there and we’ve spent a lot of time together. Hearing him share the story… I didn’t realize how much he carried around. It really brought us closer together, this project. I was always really curious and he came to a point where he felt like he needed to get rid of the story, so it was a really symbiotic process.

This notion of home is universal

The animation makes this film easier to digest—it’s so emotional, with so much pain and trauma. How did you come around to the idea to present it this way?

JPR: I have a background in radio and had asked him if I could do a radio interview about his story and he said then he wasn’t ready. But he knew he would have to share his story at some point, and when he was ready he said he would share it with me. So I kind of had it in the back of my head that this was a story we could tell together, but I hadn’t figured out how to do it. I was invited to this workshop in Denmark, which is a film school where they encourage you to develop ideas for animated documentaries. They asked me if I had an idea, and I thought, maybe this is the way to do it. I asked Amin, and he was really happy about that idea. This is his life trauma and this is the first time he talked about it. The fact that he didn’t have to be so public about it really freed him up to be open. If we shot this film in a more traditional and public manner, he would meet people on the streets and out in the world who would then know about his trauma and his secrets. It would be too tough for him to talk about it in those places where he didn’t have control. So the first reason was to keep him anonymous, and then because it took place in the past, we had to find a way to make the story come alive. Afghanistan in 1980s, Moscow in the 1990s, and having him in those places. And lastly, because it’s a story about memory and trauma, animation enabled us to be more expressive about some of the things he had a hard time talking about, or had a hard time remembering. You can sometimes hear it in the way he talks, through his voice, when he talks slower. And I thought, we need to see this in him as well. We adopted a more expressive and surreal form of animation that feels more honest to his emotional state, and was less about how realistic it looked.

Did you do any kind of emotional preparation before embarking on this story? I was surprised that Amin was lying down, as in a therapist’s office.

JPR: We had prepared for years and years to do this. In the beginning, I told him, we’re just going to try this out to see if this works. It was just the two of us in a room, in my place. I told him he could always leave and say “this isn’t working for me.” Or he could always take a break when it was too much. It was really about creating a safe space at the beginning. The fact that’s he lying down with eyes closed, and talking in the present tense is an old technique I used in interviews when I worked in radio. When you do radio, you don’t have an image, so you really need the subject to paint an image. In this case, you have Amin lying down, eyes closed, and every time he brought up a memory, I would ask him to describe the location, the room. For example, in the very beginning he’s in his home in the garden and his sister is telling stories. I’d ask him, “what did the garden look like? What kind of plants were there? What does the house look like? What are the colors on the walls?” All of this would give us information that would be used in the animation, but it would also help transport him back to that specific situation and generate memories. I was very careful, it was slow, step by step, and it took years. At some point, we were looking to get funding, and we looked each other in the eyes and said, okay, are we going to do this? Amin said, yes this feels right, let’s do it. But it was a long stretch of time where we just tried it out to see if it worked.

Was there anything in the story that surprised you? I don’t know if in this country we often think of the people that come across our borders as fleeing, but it seems like a very appropriate word.

JPR: I think it surprised me how much his experience affected him and everything he did. Like every day, he brought it into everything he did… everything he went through became a real part of this life. In the ways he worked, and how he fought like crazy to educate himself and to be able to make a living. I’m not a refugee myself, but two generations back my grandmother was born a refugee in Copenhagen. Her family was rejected for asylum and had to move on to Germany. Then because they were Jewish, they had to leave again. So I could also see through her how traumatizing it is to not have a home. It stuck with her throughout her entire life but she never talked about it. I think because Amin has been able to talk about it, it puts him in a better position.

You begin with this idea of home, and you also end with home.

JPR: If you cut everything else away, being a refugee is really someone that has lost their home and is looking for a new place to call home. And when I started talking to Amin about this, he and his boyfriend had started to look for a house. And I thought, this really is the story, looking for a place where he feels he like can be who he is with everything that entails. This notion of home is universal. I think it’s something we are all looking for in our lives, a place where we can be who we are with everything that entails. It taps into something most people can recognize.

You don’t make his sexual orientation a big deal in the film, but I was interested by his line about there not being a word for homosexual in Afghanistan.

JPR: He came out to me when he was sixteen, so it’s always been a natural part of his personality. I didn’t think sexuality was going to play a big part in the film, but slowly I realized that even fleeing his sexuality for the first period of his life was similar to the way he had been fleeing his past all the time I’ve known him. He’s always been on the run, hiding something. I thought we needed to have that story in there as well because while it’s a story about the flight of going from Afghanistan to Denmark, fundamentally it’s a story about accepting who you are and finding a place where you can be. And they actually do have words for being gay in Afghanistan, but they don’t have any neutral words. It’s all negative and offensive.