South African Cypriot writer-director Stelana Kliris’ parents emigrated from Cyprus and moved to South Africa, leaving one divided country for another. What is that experience like, you wonder? Now, you can go on a cinematic journey to travel back in time and across the world to find out. Kliris (Find Me Falling, Committed) has used the experiences of her refugee parents as inspiration and “translated this into a film that challenges the idea of ‘us’ and ‘them.'”
Apart is the movie‘s fitting title, and it stars Leem Lubany (Omar, Rock the Kasbah), Luca Pasqualino (Rivals, The Musketeers) and Girley Jazama (Under the Hanging Tree, The White Line). And with war and refugees constantly in the headlines, the film explores issues and challenges that feel particularly timely and topical.
Apart will get its world premiere at the 30th edition of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) in Estonia on Friday, Nov. 13, opening its Critics’ Picks section.
“In 1974, when Turkey invades Cyprus, young Eleni (Lubany) leaves her homeland through an arranged marriage and finds herself in Apartheid South Africa, swapping one divided country for another,” teases a synopsis for the film. “There, a new life with Nico (Pasqualino) slowly turns into love, until an unexpected friendship forces her to confront a secret from her past.”
Kliris wrote and directed Apart and produced it with Susan Simnett, Jamie Harvey and Ioanna Bolomyti. The cinematographer is Simon Sarketzis, with Emilios Avraam handling editing. Reinvent Yellow Sales is handling sales. Watch a trailer for Apart right here.
Pasqualino, who is now back on Disney+ in the second part of season 2 of the hit show Rivals, and Kliris talked to THR about Apart, how it was shot in Cyprus and captures a 1970s aesthetic, casting challenges, and how urgent the themes explored in the film feel.
Stelana, how much of Apart is based on your family’s history and experience?
STELANA KLIRIS My parents are both from Cyprus. My mom was a refugee from the war, and they actually met in South Africa. I was born and raised there. I experienced Apartheid as a child as I grew up during the ’80s in South Africa. So I grew up with all of these stories from both my parents and my own experiences. The film was an opportunity to bring all of that together.
How did Luca come aboard, especially given his busy TV schedule?
STELANA KLIRIS Luca was just an absolute gem to find. We worked with casting director Nancy Bishop, but it’s a difficult film, politically and historically, and a lot of local talent was a little fearful of taking on the subject matter. So we went outside the island [of Cyprus], and I’m so glad we did.
Luca, how did you get into your character, Nico, and his struggles?
LUCA PASQUALINO I don’t come from a Cypriot or South African background, but I do come from an immigrant Italian background. So I’ve been very much brought up around these stories. My grandparents immigrated to England from Italy after the war and then had to go through the struggles of not being from that nation. They sacrificed so much and had to forget everything that they’d ever known, leave it all behind to create a better life for themselves. That part of Nico is part of my family’s history.
And it wasn’t just the financial struggles they faced, but also not knowing the language, not knowing anything about the country. They literally had to start again. So that part of the story very much resonated with me.
Apart has characters who are not black-and-white but complicated. For example, with Nico, I loved some of the things he says or does and hated others…
STELANA KLIRIS Yes, they are very complex characters. They are very flawed and human. That was very important to me. They are not based on a specific person, but [inspired by] all these characters and people that I grew up with who were never perfect and sometimes had to do something that is maybe a little wrong to survive.
It’s a very human element, and what’s great about both Luca and Leem is that they really brought out this complexity. These characters are very three-dimensional, and they were able to really bring them to life in this way. With Luca, you get to see this really great range, because he can be very vulnerable, but his character can also be really hard, and [over time] we understand why.
LUCA PASQUALINO Nico is a very proud man. It would break his heart if he wasn’t giving his family the best that he could possibly give them. So, yes, there’s a moral ambiguity to it. The rules are there to maybe be bent or broken in certain ways, and he denies it a lot of the time. But there comes a moment where something shifts in him and he realizes he needs to take risks in life. And he decides that he’s going to go down a slightly alternative route. He does what he feels that he has to do. He has a wife, and he has to provide and care and take matters into his own hands.
Did you have an accent coach or so, Luca? How did you develop the way Nico sounds?
LUCA PASQUALINO We got there with a lot of time, a lot of repetition and a lot of frustration at times. It takes a lot of hard work when you don’t speak the language. It’s difficult to understand intonation and the flow of dialogue. Early on, our dialect coach would say a line to me, and I thought I said it exactly how she did. But she said no. To my ear, it sounded exactly the same, but to hers it didn’t. So, I hope it’s not awful. I’m happy I got to have that experience, and I hope people can understand everything that we’re trying to say.
STELANA KLIRIS They worked with a really great dialect coach called Léa Maléni, and Luca had to learn Greek. And they had to speak with an accent. We had multiple dialect coaches. Girley Jazama is actually Namibian, so she had to learn to speak Sesotho. We had Turkish Cypriot actors on set, some of whom didn’t speak any English. So at some point, we had about three or four different dialect coaches and interpreters on set. And in between takes, trying to give notes and talking about the scene just became this cacophony of languages. It was a great multinational experience.
Was there any scene that was particularly difficult to shoot?
LUCA PASQUALINO Every day was a new challenge. I loved it. But the one thing that stands out the most was just trying to make one scene feel as tragic as possible. There’s a moment where Nico talks about his brother and how he was kidnapped and murdered. At one point, I fell into this hole of overthinking it. But a couple of days before [we shot it], I decided I knew the lines, but I was not going to think about it anymore. And then the day we shot that scene, I was just open to allowing it to happen. There is a moment that was not scripted. I just had to feel that heartbreak within me instead of trying to act.
Stelana, can you tell me a bit about the visual aesthetic of the film and where you shot it? There are scenes that look a bit like an old home video…
STELANA KLIRIS We shot all of it in Cyprus. We were supposed to shoot in South Africa as well, but it didn’t work out in the end, for various reasons. Cyprus still has a lot of ’70s aesthetics in terms of buildings and neighborhoods, but we did have to hide a lot of things. And whatever we didn’t manage to hide had to be erased with VFX.
We also used an 8-millimeter camera for a lot of scenes to give it that lovely ’70s home video look. In fact, a party scene in an apartment is an exact replica of home videos I have from my parents, where immigrant Cypriots gathered in little apartments and squeezed together, having parties. We used some archive footage as well, just to really make it as authentic as possible and really show South Africa in the ’70s. We’ve mixed it up. Some of it is our own, some of it is archive. Hopefully, you can’t really tell. It’s just all there to immerse people in that era.
Apart is a historic snapshot, but it also feels quite timely. Or maybe it’s timeless? What do you think?
STELANA KLIRIS I think it’s very relevant. I think everyone can relate to being young and struggling and trying to find your way in the world, regardless of the era or whether there’s a backdrop of war. It’s a very human story and very intimate. And it really tries to boil down to a human level the many problems that we still have, the same problems that we’ve had throughout history.
LUCA PASQUALINO All you have to do is turn on the news, and you can see that it’s happening all over the world. The unfortunate, sad reality is that for a lot of people, there is always something to fight over. Even if you were to take the war element out of the script, there are still so many other things going on.
The relationship between Nico and Eleni is the real heart of the film. It’s two people who, for their own reasons, are trying to find a better life, trying to escape, and they end up finding solace in each other. The war is the backdrop for a really emotional, heart-wrenching love story.
