Production
In an interview with indieWire, director Rania Ajami stated that the idea for the film came from a recurring dream that her brother had about a "giant beard" that was trying to devour him. From the premise of her brother's dreams, Ajami created a play titled The Giant Swearing Beard that told the story of six people trying to break into an asylum. About six years later, Ajami was inspired by discussions about political asylum seekers and decided that a film based on the premise of her play would be a suitable metaphor for the real-world political issues.
With an estimated budget of US $1.5 million, the creators of the film made adjustments to stay within the modest budget while also attempting to stay true to the "visual scope of the film " and the perceived "fantasy world".
Asylum Seekers was filmed entirely on Red Digital Cinema Camera Company's Red One camera, a digital video camera capable of recording video in 12-megapixel resolution directly to flash memory or a hard disk drive. As of August 2008, the Red One was being used to film at least 40 feature films but Asylum Seekers is one of the first independent film features to use the camera. The production team of the film opted for the Red One because if offered significant financial savings over a 35 mm film film camera while not compromising image quality.
Rania Ajami said that the casting process took over a year because she found that the biggest challenge in the production process "was to find good people to work with". The production was then halted for another month before the filming could begin because Ajami had contracted Infectious Mononucleosis — usually referred to as mono — and had to spend a month in bed.
Read more about this topic: Asylum Seekers (film)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.”
—Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)