She apparently intends to go to Afghanistan in the near future.
Rookie director Nora Twomey turned to U.N. Special Envoy Angelina Jolie for her expertise on Afghanistan.
Anne Thompson
Irish animator Nora Twomey didn’t need
Angelina Jolie to make the Oscar-animated “
The Breadwinner.”
The production was already fully financed by Cartoon Saloon in
Kilkenny, Ireland, Aircraft Pictures in Toronto, and Melusine
Productions in Luxembourg.
However, Twomey didn’t want Jolie’s name; she wanted her mind. This
would be Twomey’s first outing as a solo director, and she recognized
early on that she could use Jolie’s expertise on Afghanistan, where the
U.N. Goodwill Ambassador has built schools for girls. Twomey wanted to
tackle a sensitive drama about political oppression with adult
sophistication and style; the story is based on Deborah Ellis’ 2000 YA
novel about a tough 11-year-old girl who dresses as a boy in order to
feed her mother and sisters when her father is captured by the Taliban.
So Twomey reached out to Jolie through mutual friends Jehane Noujaim
and Karim Amer, the Egyptian filmmakers behind Oscar-nominated
documentary “The Square.” Said Jolie, “We knew each other from working
on refugee issues.”
Jolie not only offered advice about story beats and hiring voice
actors, but also the intricacies of Afghanistan culture and navigating
the country’s infrastructure. “Who better?” said Twoney. “She’s like a
diplomat. She had a long interest in Afghanistan and an understanding of
the issues we tried to explore in ‘The Breadwinner.’ She was someone
who didn’t take anything lightly, she thought deeply, it was evident in
everything she does. That was something we could use.”
“When we met, we just both saw the same film,” said Jolie. “We want
people to respect what these young children go through and understand
this magical culture with a rich, deep history. With the Afghanistan
people, you only think about oppression. You don’t think about how a
father loves his daughter, and what a daughter will do to risk her life
for her daddy. People don’t think of those things, especially for
Afghanistan after all these years of war.”
Twomey and Jolie also agreed to not pander to young viewers, but be
willing to show them the realities of conflict. “We make big mistakes
when we speak down to children on these issues,” said Jolie. “I’ve been
surprised by the children I’ve brought to see this film — I thought my
own would understand this — but others may see a woman in a burqa being
beaten by the Taliban for the first time, or see why a little a girl
would have to go to work to feed her family or change her gender in
order to do that, what this is for women… They are able to absorb that
and walk away feeling that they would be friends with Parvana, that they
like to see themselves in her, that they are proud of Parvana and
believe they are capable of more as children, that their voices matter.”
Twomey and Jolie were closely involved in the casting of the Afghan
voices. Jolie listened carefully to tapes “to find the soul of the
person,” she said. “This voice is too funny, or too old, or this person
doesn’t sound as gentle.”
“She has an actor’s ear,” said Twomey, who credits Jolie with helping
her cast an actress with a bubbly personality as Parvana’s best friend
to counterbalance her heroine’s gravity. “She can’t be happy, as she is
mourning her father who is missing.”
One way to modulate the terror was to keep the audience connected to
the characters and show the stark beauty of the landscape and the power
of a young girl’s fantasies. Twomey used an Afghanistan color palette to
show “Parvana’s imagination and capacity as a storyteller and
connection with her father and culture,” she said. “We wanted it to be a
celebration of a young girl’s imagination, her love for her father and
family, and her innocence and wisdom and flaws. We wanted her to be
quite real: Imagination allows you to do that.”
Added Jolie, “I’d give little hints here and there for the early
boards and the music,” she said. “The biggest discussion was about how
do you end this: You cannot say, ‘Here come the planes and everything
was better.’ You can’t do that to this country. And yet you want to give
hope and say there’s a moving forward and yet have to be realistic that
there is a future for Afghanistan.”
Twomey screened the movie for the First Lady of Afghanistan as well
as an Afghan educator who also dressed as a boy to go to a secret
school; the woman now runs schools for girls in Kabul. Older relatives
of the film’s voice actors have been moved to talk about their own
experiences for the first time after seeing the film. The filmmaker also
screened “The Breadwinner” for the U.N. representative from
Afghanistan, where the dubbed movie will be shown on television. “They
have embraced it,” she said.
Jolie can’t wait to go back to the country and screen it as well.
“They have ‘Sesame Street’ with Afghan characters,” she said. “Art has
made its way. The Afghan people are an extremely creative people. They
love this film because of all of their own that they recognize, from the
way they have dinner to the music.”
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