Nikolaj Arcel, Ilker Çatak and Other Shortlisted Filmmakers on Bringing Their Movies to Life

Hilton Dresden
·10 min read
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The second of two panels hosted by The Hollywood Reporter at the Palm Springs International Feature Film featured a breadth of official Oscar submissions from around the world. The discussion, moderated by The Hollywood Reporter’s Mia Galuppo, highlighted how these films varied greatly in both tone and scope.

One such film is Germany’s entry, The Teacher’s Lounge, directed by İlker Çatak, which focuses on a teacher caught between wanting to help a student accused of theft and the rigidity of her own school’s rules. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mstyslav Chernov’s 20 Days in Mariupol, Ukraine’s official Oscars entry, is a documentary about the Russian invasion within the besieged city of Mariupol. Michael A. Goorjian directs Amerikatsi, Armenia’s selection, a comedy-drama about an Armenian-American locked up in a Soviet prison.

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Other films featured include Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters, from Tunisia, a documentary about a Tunisian woman whose two oldest daughters become radicalized by Islamic extremists. And rounding out the panel is Nikolaj Arcel, with The Promised Land, Denmark’s official international feature selection for the Academy Awards. It tells the story of a war hero in 18th-century Denmark and his nobleman nemesis.

The following conversation explores how these five filmmakers conceived and made their films, and the challenges they overcame to complete their visions.

Note: as of Tuesday morning, The Teacher’s Lounge, 20 Days in Mariupol, and Four Daughters are official Oscar nominees.

Have you had any favorite screening experiences of your film so far?

İLKER ÇATAK I have to say, our very first US screening at Telluride was something special, just because you could feel the tension in the room. That was the moment where I realized: U.S. audiences are just reacting much more in a physical way to the film than European ones. And I think that’s got to do with the whole gun thing. There is this expectation of the film that [something] is going to happen. And I think that it’s great to see when an audience is just really engaged.

20 days in Mariupol screened almost a full year ago for the first time at Sundance. How has it been continuing to screen this film as the conflict in the Ukraine has continued?

MSTYSLAV CHERNOV It has gone through a very interesting process, this year, because first, we were even worried that it’s going to be too heavy on the audiences when we assembled the film, when we finished it. One of our goals was to make the war very real, as real as possible. So we were actually worried how the audience [would] react. And then we got an Audience Award at Sundance. Then we started screening in many countries, including Ukraine, and that’s where the most emotional and deep experiences in these screenings came, because people who left Mariupol, who just lost their city and their families, they went to see the film. 500 people, 300 people, almost entirely refugees from Mariupol. I was worried that it [would] be traumatizing for them. But in fact, it was kind of the opposite. Because it’s a hard experience. But also it’s a community experience. When people come together and they experience their common tragedy together in a safe environment, it feels almost like the beginning of their psychological treatment, or their collective trouble, that there is an effect which I never thought [was] going to be there. They still said, “Thank you,” because that’s the only thing that’s left of the city, that film. Mariupol is such a phenomenon. It’s just gone as a city. There is very little filmed there. There is this documentary, and now Russia just made a scripted film about Mariupol, completely rewriting the history. And that’s why it’s so important to just preserve this in film, this theme.

You were capturing this footage in an active war zone. What practical complications did you come up against?

CHERNOV So first of all, this is not the first time I’m in a war zone. I’ve spent almost a decade in different war zones: Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Gaza. So there is a certain process of footage gathering, news gathering, that already kind of works. Safety procedures. But the pressure was that there was no one else in the city. It’s kind of phenomenal, that in a city of half a million people under the siege, there is no one, no journalist, except one video camera, one photo camera and one producer. And the pressure of getting everything, every single shot, was so big, that we just couldn’t stop. There was nowhere to charge batteries, obviously, no cards left. It was a mess. We had one place where we could charge batteries, and then it got bombed, the whole office of the Red Cross got bombed. And then there was a hospital where we kind of could sleep and charge batteries, but it got occupied and surrounded by Russians, and we were just sneaking out from there. So it’s just luck, actually. Habit and luck, everything together.

For Four Daughters, what I was amazed by is just the messiness of the documentary medium in and of itself. I’m wondering if you can, for those who haven’t seen it, go over your choice to include actors? 

KAOUTHER BEN HANIA Four Daughters is a hybrid documentary, where I took the real character, they have a real story, it’s their story. It’s the mother and her four daughters. The two eldest daughters, they disappear. So the idea was to bring actors, so that the real character can direct the actors, to summon their past, to understand it, to question it, and to go through this introspective journey. My first reflex was to do a normal documentary, a fly on the wall documentary. It doesn’t work. Because the story was multi-layered, and it was so complex, I couldn’t tell it in this form. Then I was thinking, “if I want to know why the two daughters disappeared, I need to go to their past,” and there is a huge cliche called reenactment in documentary filmmaking, which I hate. So I was thinking about Alfred Hitchcock, the great American filmmaker, who said once that it’s better to start with the cliche than to end up with one. So I told myself, “I’ll start with the cliche.” Like, I’ll take the cliche of reenactment. I’ll hijack it, you know. So I’ll bring actors, but the idea was to do something more like theater, something where we are in the scene, we are summoning a traumatic memory, but also questioning these memories, because actors ask a lot of questions about the motivation of the character. The idea was to do this hybrid meta documentary, where we go through the past of this family, this mother and her four daughters. It’s a very feminine movie with a lot of women in the crew. I wanted to create a safe space, since it’s about introspection, about trauma, so everybody can feel comfortable talking about those things.

Michael, I was particularly struck by the careful tone you were able to balance. Your story is about an Armenian refugee turned prisoner in his homeland, but it’s filled with optimism and joy and humor. How did you go about finding that tone?

MICHAEL A. GOORJIAN I wanted to make a film for Armenians, but also for non-Armenians. Armenia, we’ve suffered quite a bit from people just not knowing much about the country or the culture. And so in trying to create a piece that would be both universal but also work for Armenians, the genocide has been a centerpoint for Armenian film, there hasn’t been a lot beyond that subject matter. I wanted to make something that was hopeful, that Armenians could be proud of, but that would, despite everything we’ve been through, [show] we’re still here. And that’s just as important: the ability to survive and make it through difficult times. So I wanted it to be a film that people would enjoy watching. I feel like being Armenian, having to go to a lot of films about the genocide, it’s painful. I just wanted it to be something that people would enjoy watching. In terms of the tone, yeah, it is a weird balance between comedy and drama. When I was editing the film, I was like, “Is this good? Or is this terrible? I don’t know.” For me, independent filmmaking is all about the ability to take risks and try different things. It’s very hard, when you have bigger budgets, to be able to experiment and play around. I also think for me, the music was a big component in terms of helping to pull everything together. We were lucky enough to have the National Philharmonic of Armenia [record] the score for us. Armenia is a very small country. When I started the film, it was me and a few people and then it snowballed, and we got more and more people and now the whole country is kind of behind this project. That has meant a lot to me.

Nikolaj, you’ve collaborated with your actor, Mads Mikkelsen, before. Did you notice a difference in how you’ve changed as artists? Or is it a riding a bike situation?

NIKOLAJ ARCEL No, I don’t think it’s riding a bike. I think it’s definitely easier to work with somebody who you already know very well, and you’ve worked together and you’ve become friends, and you’ve had a pleasurable collaboration and had a lot of fun. And then when you meet again, on your next film, it is a lot easier, because you don’t have that weird period of “Can I trust this person? What do they want? Do they want the same as me?” But one of the things that I think was important for me in this one, because I really wanted the evolution of the character of Ludovic to be very big, but very subtle, so that the man changes to something completely different… There’s only a very few actors in the world, and especially in Denmark, that can do that. So I knew that from the get go, I had to come back to Mads for this role. And he always jokes that: “Hey, you didn’t call me for 10 years. What’s up, Nick?” And it’s not really about that. It’s just about, there were no roles that were suited, that I thought [were] exactly the [right] kind of thing, but this role was so perfect for him. And I knew I couldn’t do the film without him. So it was very important for me, I think we had a maybe even more joyful [experience] this time around because we just didn’t have that little period of insecurity, it was just like going directly into, “Okay, here we are again, let’s really try to make the best piece of art we can.”

Did you have much rehearsal time?

ARCEL I had no rehearsal time. That’s not even a budgetary thing. That’s me and Mads actually both agreeing that — Mads calls it fairy dust, the fairy dust that happens when you’re on set. And if you over rehearse… it’s not true for every film, some directors love to rehearse, and I admire and respect that. And I might do that at some point. But up until this point in my career, I just love the spontaneity that happens on set, I don’t want to over rehearse, and especially on a film like this, which was period, and you have a lot of big setups and different things going on, I like to still just keep the intimacy and the spontaneity and the sort of improvisational nature of it. I’d like to keep that alive.

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