Film-maker Mark Rosenblatt focuses on the legacy of the Holocaust in his short GANEF, which deals with a young girl’s perception of the cleaner who works in the family home.
Film And TV Now spoke with the film-maker about the short.
FILM AND TV NOW: The Holocaust continues to provide such a fascinating point of reference to film-makers of all backgrounds. What emotional connection does it create in you overall?
MARK ROSENBLATT: As a grandson of survivors, it makes me grateful to be alive, for starters. And, growing up listening to my grandmother’s unbelievable story of survival in hiding during the war, it makes me all too aware of how quickly the world can turn on people who had thought themselves reasonably safe. People think that, because it happened so long ago, it’s power must have faded. But, when it’s your family, your grandparents and you remember what happened to them, it remains a powerful force.
FTVN: What was the start-off point for the script?
MR: There’s a story in my family about a Holocaust-surviving relative, paranoid because of their experiences in the war, hiding valuables to keep them from being stolen.
So I wondered asked, well what if that person had a little girl and she thought that the threat was real, and that the cleaner was a thief. And I took it from there. It seemed like an economic micro-story to explore how fear and trauma was passed down from one generation to the next.
FTVN: Tell us about your cast and how did the involvement of DOWNTON ABBEY’S Sophie McShera help get the project off the ground?
MR: We were lucky that the project was already happening when we approached Sophie. But it gave us a huge boost when she said yes. Sophie’s playfulness, openness and warmth were essential to helping the audience believe in the loving relationship between the cleaner and the little girl which then starts to fall apart.
Similarly, when Lydia Wilson – who plays Mrs Hirth, the little girl’s troubled mother – also agreed to do it we were so thrilled. She’s an extraordinary actor on stage as well as a TV and film (Kenneth Branagh’s All is True, Richard Curtis’ About Time opposite Domhnall Gleeson & Rachel McAdams). To have that huge experience on set was massive.
The biggest challenge for the film was finding our Ruthie (the little girl) and, all I can say is, we were so so lucky to find Izabella. We met about 40 girls, either on tape or in person, and some of the girls we met were a bit older, but it became really clear that, for this story to work, Ruthie had to be young enough to plausibly make the mistakes she does because she is scared.
There’s always a risk with actors as young as Izabella – she was FIVE when we first met her! – but her emotional intelligence, energy and wit, as well as her understanding of the camera (she’d done some modelling already), made her the standout choice. And on set she transcended all our high expectations. She was quite amazing to work with.
FTVN: Tell us about your production team.
MR: Too many key contributors to do justice to in one answer but I knew that we needed as many excellent female HODS working on this female-centred story.
Our DoP, Alana Mejia-Gonzalez, is a stellar talent. She was fresh out of film school when we shot this, but it’s no surprise she’s already shot features and an upcoming Netflix series. She gave me so much time in prep to distil all my wild ideas into something compact, elegant and achievable.
She also gave the film its distinctive look, choosing an anamorphic lense to help give the house a sense of scale that intensified the little girl’s POV. And Theo Ribeiro was an amazing gaffer who worked like crazy to create the lighting set ups the shot list required.
I was also extremely lucky to get the renowned editor Maya Maffioli on board. I had always loved Beast, the BAFTA-winning feature she cut for Michael Pearce. More recently she cut the multi-award-winning Rocks, Clio Barnard’s Ava & Ali and Michael Pearce’s latest Encounter with Riz Ahmed and Octavia Spencer.
Working with her was like my own private film school module. Maya is brilliant and instinctive and brutal with the coverage. She did so much to help the film find an easy rhythm and to shape performances.
Her long-time collaborator Gunnar Oskarsson (sound) and Marc Teitler (score) added sonic layers which, though minimal, drew out the sense of lurking danger under the playful childlike POV and the shimmering surface of the house.
We also had Sofia Stocco as Production Designer who just designed amazing British indie features like Claire Oakley’s Make-Up and Ruth Paxton’s A Banquet. And my brilliant costume designer Sheara Abrahams linked up beautifully with our location house and Sofia’s palette to create muted post-war tones and a sense of childhood going wrong.
FTVN: Where did you shoot and for how long?
MR: We had 3.5 days to shoot in a beautiful house in North West London.
FTVN: How did you raise finance for the short?
MR: Mostly raised privately, with some additional resources from our exec producers and various sources of in-kind support.
FTVN: You have a very prestigious theatre background with the National, Shakespeare’s Globe and the London West End. What prompted you to make the transition from theatre to film and what are the key things you have learned in your evolution as a film-maker and screenwriter?
MR: I’d always wanted to work in film as well as theatre, where I’ve been a director for twenty years.
What finally made it happen was a chance encounter a few years back, with an American film producer on the Tube in London. He was reading reviews of a play I’d directed. When I nosily asked why, he told me he’d just acquired the film rights. Blown away by this coincidence, we went for a coffee and – taking a ridiculous leap of faith – he hired me to adapt the play for screen. I basically learnt how to write on the job. Baptism of fire! And that gave me the confidence to start imagining myself writing my own material for film.
It took a while – I adapted a few other plays for film, including a feature film which got released in 2019 – but GANEF is the first original screenplay of my own I’ve shot. In theatre, I’m a director, not a playwright. But in film, I love writing and directing. It feels incredibly personal and instinctive.
I definitely feel with film it’s easier to walk a mile in someone’s shoes, to plunge into their present moment, visually, without words. Theatre requires more spoken language. Film is more visual and I love that.
I also love that what you shoot you keep (and I imagine a lot of theatre directors in film feel the same). In theatre a scene can work like a dream on one given rehearsal and fall flat the next. But in film it’s in the bag. And that is very liberating. The pressure in theatre to create something that feels spontaneous but is repeatable every night can be very challenging.
 But the great carry-over from theatre to the film set are the years of experience I have working with actors in the rehearsal room. In theatre you build performances slowly across several weeks with the actor before the technical process begins.
On set, surrounded by cameras, lights and the need to capture, it’s the opposite. So I feel confident about working with actors, even under time pressure.
FTVN: What are your cinematic and theatrical influences?
MR: Like everyone, so varied. I have a great weakness for virtuosos, like Paul Thomas Anderson and the Safdie Brothers, Alice Rohrwacher and Celine Sciamma, who can tell painful emotional stories with outrageous flair, whose camera is always moving audaciously.
And I love quiet film-making too – invisible direction, the quiet observation of complex, intimate moments – like Todd Field or Eliza Hittman. The same goes for theatre – I was brought up on the virtuosity of Theatre de Complicite but also adore the almost invisible direction of British theatre directors like James McDonald and Ian Rickson.
FTVN: What issues and themes would you most like to explore in future work?
MR: The stories we tell ourselves, however delusional, to create a sense of higher purpose, even if that takes us into strange and illogical, even dangerous places. The trickle down of trauma, and how it distorts the tiniest interactions.
FTVN: GANEF has been selected for thirty film festivals. What are your hopes for the short on the circuit overall?
MR: Well we’re nearing our end point on the circuit now and it’s been a fantastic ride.
It’s my first time round, so really, I just wanted to get the film seen by as many people as possible. I guess we also wanted to find the film’s level and we’ve been thrilled to be selected by so many Oscar and BAFTA qualifying festivals, like Hollyshorts, LA Shorts, Chicago Children’s, Manhattan Short, Tirana International, Norwich, as well as many other wonderful festivals championing independent film all over the world.
What we’ve missed, because of the pandemic, is the live experience, which is slowly returning. I don’t think anything beats sitting in a cinema full of strangers, watching your own film, to find out what your film is made of, where it works, where it doesn’t.
As much as online distribution and festivals have been a saving grace, I’m not sure film-makers have learnt much about their films during lock-down. Nothing beats the collective experience and there’s a danger that, if all we have as feedback is online data and algorithms, a generation of film-makers won’t know how to develop their storytelling skills.
FTVN: What do you feel are the priorities for the theatre industry given the effect of the global challenge on closures etc.?
MR: Surviving. Persuading audiences to come back. Contending with the at-home habits many people have, out of necessity, developed in lockdown.
FTVN: Would you like to expand the themes of this short into a feature?
MR: Yes, very much. I’m working on a feature length right now.
FTVN: Finally, what are you most proud of about this short film?
MR: So many things, honestly. Writing and directing my first original film and articulating in it a very personal story.
Representing the experience of people who survived as a reminder that the impact of persecution never ends, but travels down from generation to generation. And just spending nearly two years pushing it out into the world in the hope we reach a lot of people. To now be Oscar qualified is a huge source of pride.
