Strictly Ballroom’s triumphant finale to Mads Mikkelsen’s glorious turn in
Another Round, dance has long been utilised by directors to execute their more cathartic scenes. In Christos Nikou’s
Apples, the moment arrives one hour in. As
Let’s Twist Again starts playing in an Athens bar, Aris (Aris Servetalis) slinks onto the dancefloor, his body moving in time to the music as one hand remains clasped around his drink. The scene, which was shot in a single take, provides Aris temporary respite from the film’s curious condition, while the track speaks to the feature’s ambiguous age. “In the script it was
No Hard Feelings, 2020(Film still)
No Hard Feelings follows a love affair between a German-Iranian teen and an Iranian refugee. Here, director Faraz Shariat and lead actor Benjamin Radjaipour discuss the making of the film and its reception
December 04, 2020
Faraz Shariat arrived at the premise for his debut feature,
No Hard Feelings, a year into his community service at a refugee centre in Cologne, following an arrest for shoplifting at an expensive department store. “I was smoking in front of the hotel where people were staying and asked someone for a light,” the German-Iranian director tells AnOther. “I asked in Farsi and because I have an accent, he realised I wasn’t born in Iran. He asked if I was born here [in Germany], I said yes and he was like ‘lucky you’. It was small, but it clearly shows how, to a normative white gaze, we look the same but actually, we don’t have the same privileges.” The interaction would go on to inform one of the film’s seminal m