LuxFilmFest jury members Laverty and Rasoulof on cinema in uncertain times

Ahead of the Luxembourg City Film Festival’s awards ceremony on Saturday 14 March, the Luxembourg Times spoke to members of this year’s international jury.

Paul Laverty, a scriptwriter and frequent collaborator with director Ken Loach, noted the duty of filmmaking to confront current injustices.

Mohammad Rasoulof, an exiled Iranian filmmaker whose film The Seed of the Sacred Fig won multiple awards at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, spoke of his leaving the Islamic Republic, his personal approach to confrontational film, and how film festivals have the power to unite diverse viewpoints in a single, cinematic language.

Paul Laverty

Laverty is best known for his screenplays directed by legendary British filmmaker Ken Loach. The pairs’ collaborations are often politically charged, dealing with issues of inequality, social injustice, and poverty from a left-wing perspective – resulting in films in an unabashed, social-realist mode.

Laverty’s perspective on cinema, as a screenwriter and as a member of LuxFilmFest’s jury, are clear. “Artists,” he said, “have responded to what is going on around them. But the big question for film, of course, is that it’s an expensive medium. It begs the question of who commissions the scripts, who greenlights the projects, and who are the gatekeepers.”

The Scot harbours no doubts that young writers and directors are motivated to respond to the world as they see it. But for the screenwriter of I, Daniel Blake, which won the Palme D’or at Cannes in 2016, a question remains: “Do they get the chance?”

“I’ve been very very lucky because of my association with Ken Loach,” he continued, “and also Rebecca O’Brien, our producer. It took the three of us to make these films. Talking to friends, it’s getting harder and harder to make independent films. But the times cry out for it. And I must mention this: the elephant in the sitting room now is what’s been happening in Gaza.”

Laverty, whose career has been continuously based on uncovering historical injustices, cites ‘A Cartography of Genocide’, a recent digital platform produced by Forensic Architecture, a multidisciplinary research group based at Goldsmiths, University of London.

“With all the skills and all the rigour of architects,” Laverty emphasised, “they bring their skills to what’s been happening in Gaza, and they published an 823 page report.”

“They’ll look at the question of food in Gaza and assemble tens of thousands of information points, videos, and incidents, and they’ll geolocate it, so they know the exact time and place,” he explained.

This documentation of events in Gaza since Hamas’ attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, to Laverty, represents one of the most pertinent issues of our time. 

“I’ll challenge anyone to look at that document and the platform. They’re absolutely transparent in their methodology. To me that is proof that a genocide is taking place,” he said.

Uncovering such injustices, to Laverty, is hampered by the material reality of filmmaking. But he hopes that young artists get their chance. “Even if you got through and commissioned a writer, and even if you get the money to make the film. The next leap: how are you going to distribute it? Under who and what circumstances and what conditions? It goes back to power and politics.” 

Paul Laverty (left) with director Ken Loach, winner of the Palme d’Or, and producer Rebecca O’Brien at the winners’ photocall at the 69th Festival de Cannes back in 2016 © Photo credit: Shutterstock

“So I think we have to be more inventive. You tell stories that are really truthful, really funny, really insightful – so that people do want to see them. Because Brecht said: ‘there’s no fun, there’s no show!”

Mohammad Rasoulof

When asked what had kept him going during his years of imprisonment and repression, Mohammad Rasoulof leant back in his seat, put his hands on his head, and thought for a moment. “Hope,” he finally replied. “And this surviving, unexpected new generation in Iran.”

The Iranian filmmaker was forced to flee Iran last year when authorities demanded he withdraw his latest film, The Seed of the Sacred Film, from the official competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Facing years in prison and the prospect of never making another film again, Rasoulof chose to escape. 

Now, nearly a year later, the exiled director is the president of the Luxembourg City Film Festival’s international jury. But speaking to the Luxembourg Times and Luxemburger Wort with the help of a translator, the Oscar nominee nevertheless said that he would eventually return to Iran to face his sentence. Hope had kept him going until now; but a love for Iran and its people pulls him back.

But before he returns, the FIPRESCI Prize winner said he plans to produce more films.

“The new developments in my life will have an influence on my language,” the director said, “but what will remain is my attachment, my belonging that goes with the state of mind of my culture.”

“I think your culture and language are nothing but an entry to the wide world, so this is just the window from which you discover the world and describe. The window won’t change; I’ll still belong to the same culture, the same mindset, the same language, and I’ll go on trying to renew my expression,” he added.

Rasoulof had faced repression in Iran before, having been arrested in 2010 for allegedly filming without a permit. The visceral reaction to his films, he believes, goes beyond the political dimensions of authoritarianism. 

“It’s a question of distance,” the Iranian director elaborated. “In our cultures, we are used to ‘wait and see’; to take some distance before being able to report something or analyse something; to let time give us sufficient distance.”

“When you make a work of art in the middle of the chaos, as if you had put a camera in a volcano, then all of a sudden it’s something unexpected, something brutal. It’s only justified by this aspiration, this need, this urge for freedom, which is not just mine,” he said. “It takes a whole group of people who stand for their artistic freedom and create together.”

How would his cinematic outlook, coupled with his recent life experiences, translate into his gaze as jury president? For Rasoulof, there’s a joy in diverse perspectives – or “windows” – through which we see the world.

“All the joy and excitement of being a jury member,” Rasoulof said, “is to be surrounded by very interesting people and people who come from different backgrounds, with different experiences, with different social lives and gazes on cinema. We put in common our windows on the same object, the same film, and try to understand how others feel.”

Laverty has described Rasoulof as “a remarkable man; very funny, very smart, very humane.” Rasoulof, only last month, cited Ken Loach’s film I, Daniel Blake (for which Laverty served as a screenwriter) as one of his favourite films of all time.

When he learnt that Laverty would be on the jury with him, he was ecstatic: “You cannot imagine my joy when I found out he was going to be a part of this jury. Just this experience of being able to meet these people and talk with them, to have this connection and this empathy; that shows the power of cinema.”