LOOK, STRANGER A FILM BY ARIELLE JAVITCH 1 there a witness to my suffering? Am I alone? I’ve always been drawn to this question and felt LOOK, STRANGER is a psychological drama about a it should be the emotional idea driving the woman as she struggles with grief, loss, her past, woman traveling home in a war-torn world. and a world seemingly absent of a god. I felt also that the question resonated with the desire of refugees all over the world to believe that somewhere, somehow, someone was bearing witness to their displacement. Do you see me? My intention with this first film is to tell a story that narrates the physical drama of a displaced person. But I hope the film also offers a vision of something more enigmatic: some of the mystery and loneliness of spiritual longing. Synopsis The landscape is an important main character in the film’s story, and it was the point of de- parture from which the rest of the visual design of the film was created. Searching for an evocative but geographically ambiguous setting, I scouted locations in the western United Set in the urban wastelands and desolate forests of an unidentified world at war, LOOK, States, northeastern Turkey, and the Republic of Georgia before finding the right combination STRANGER tells the story of a woman making a dangerous journey home from a refugee of beauty and desolation in the mountains and neglected urban towns of southwestern Ser- camp. When her guide is killed on the road in an arbitrary act of violence, the woman is forced bia. I wanted to suggest something bitter and melancholic in the contrast between the film’s to rely on an angry and disillusioned carrier, who agrees to travel with her for a price. On her beautiful natural world and the ugliness of the film’s manmade ruins, abandoned buildings, journey, the woman is forced to struggle with the realities of war and a mind damaged and and scattered trash. haunted by the past. Longing to believe in something hopeful, the woman forges a fragile bond with the carrier. Their fleeting connection remedies some of the spiritual loneliness of Working with very little, Nevena Mijuskovic, the production designer, was extremely resourceful at life on the road. creating a cohesive environment that for the most part defies time, place, and language. COME AND SEE, STALKER, and THE LAST BATTLE were a few of the cinematic influences we dis- cussed when designing the look and feel of the film’s exteriors. We also strove to create a sense of claustrophobia in the film’s interiors, and worked with the rule that no prop should be in the film Director’s Statement that couldn’t be found at a trash dump or carried over a long period and distance. Michael Simmonds, the cinematographer, (CHOP SHOP, GOODBYE SOLO) was, along with In 2004, when I began writing the script for LOOK, STRANGER, I envisioned a spare, visual the lead cast, my most important creative collaborator, and he and I prepped the look of the story about a displaced woman trying to get home through an extraordinarily hostile environ- film extensively. We worked with two central visual ideas: First, a dangerous world that’s ment. I foresaw the emotional core of my story being about the connections the woman made difficult to see clearly and that’s in continual conflict with the characters moving through it. with different characters along the way and how she was transformed and enlightened by her Secondly, a world that is experienced only with available light, firelight, and fluorescent camp- journey. The film would be a testament to hope in a dark world. ing light. These two ideas contribute to the film’s tension and to its realism. To balance this, Simmonds used vintage Cooke lenses that give the film a soft, dream-like quality, and that But films have a mysterious personality all of their own that pushes them into being the sto- allow us to sense some of the woman’s inner, psychological world. ries they long to be. By the time I finished filming and editing, the film’s story had become a tragedy. The damage from the war was so deeply wound into the woman’s existence that As soon as I met the actress Anamaria Marinca (4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, 2 DAYS), I knew she was no longer capable of connecting emotionally with others. Her journey had not only she was the right person to play the protagonist of the film. Her combination of intelligence, brought her home to a shell of a house, it had brought her home to a spiritual shell. Is there strength, and moral vigor, both as a person and as an artist, would make this character com- hope in a dark world? plex, inspiring, irritating, moving, and believable. “Who’s there?” is the first question in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and to me, one of the most The man in my story was much more challenging to cast. I wanted to portray a male character mysterious questions in Western literature. It suggests so much more: Why are we here? Is not typically represented in the war film genre: a man who doesn’t belong in a war environ- 2 3 ment at all, who finds himself severed from civil society and at a loss for an identity in a world of male brutality. When I met Tom Burke, I was moved by the sensitivity and inner conflict he was able to project. Within the story, his character’s vulnerability is a complicated contrast to the female character’s toughness. Last but not least: the child. During an extensive casting process in which I met boys from all different nationalities and backgrounds, I became more and more convinced that the child should be played by a gypsy. In the film, the child character may be a real child being remem- bered, a ghost, a spiritual witness, or the woman’s alter ego. I felt this ambiguity fit well with the mystery and itinerant history of gypsies. When I met with a group of thirty local gypsy boys near our mountain town, there was one girl who had stubbornly insisted on tagging along with her brothers. She was the most gifted of the whole group, but she was a girl, and I had envi- sioned the character as a boy. After the audition was over, she ran and jumped into one of our production vans parked outside and refused to climb out. The role was cast there and then. How could I make a film about a woman’s refusal to give up and not be moved by the fight in this six year-old girl? Valentina Berisa cast herself. Production Notes In fitting with its nationally non-specific story, the film’s creative team came from all over the world. The lead cast came from Romania, the United Kingdom, and Albania, with support- ing cast from Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria. Our production team joined us from the United States, Serbia, Slovenia, Turkey, Germany, and France. This international group of filmmakers found themselves in Nova Varos, a small, multi-ethnic mountain town in southwestern Serbia, where along with the local townspeople, we lived and worked for two months. It was a fascinating and troubling experience to make a fiction film about war alongside so many people who had recently experienced conflict first hand. One cast member had lost an arm to a NATO bomb not far from our shooting locations; another had lost a cousin to a land- mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo; one of our crew had developed childhood cancer from the stress of life during wartime in Croatia. These personal experiences were instrumen- tal in inspiring common cause and solidarity during our shoot. Each cast and crew member, regardless of nationality, was able to identify and engage deeply with the universal themes and experiences in the film’s narrative, in part because of the personal relationships devel- oped during production. By the end of the shoot, many long term friendships had been cre- ated among people between whom there had formerly been a vague mistrust. This is also an important accomplishment of the film, and the production team’s greatest source of pride. 4 5 About the Writer/Director ARIELLE JAVITCH, born in 1975, is from New York City. She came to filmmaking from a contem- porary dance and performance background, and in 2002 began making short dance films that gradually evolved into short narratives. Her work has been awarded support and recognition from Cinereach, the Sundance Institute/Annenberg Foundation, the Edit Center, New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Dance Films Association. She was also recently cited as one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 Filmmakers to Watch.” Javitch is a former Fulbright Scholar in modern history. LOOK, STRANGER is her first feature film. About the Cast ANAMARIA MARINCA trained at the University of Fine Arts, Music and Drama George Enescu, in the Romanian city of lasi where she also taught for four years. Her work for the theatre has included productions in Romania and the UK - Youth Theatre (Piatra Neamt), Bulandra The- atre (Bucharest) Complicite. and The Young Vic (London). For her work on stage, Anamaria won the award for Best Actress of the Year at the Young Actors Gala in Mangalia in 2000. She first came to wider public attention in 2005 when she won a Best Actress BAFTA for her per- formance in the British Channel 4 TV mini-series “Sex Traffic” by David Yates.