Radu Mihaileanu: “We chose to bet on the chance that women would be the ones to bring change”

Radu Mihaileanu’s film echoes the revolutions in the Arab world:
These revolutions represent a huge step forward. We wrote the film with the same sort of intentions, and we bet on the chance that women would be the ones to bring change, not simply throughout the world but especially in the Muslim world.

Radu Mihaileanu on the way he chose to show the village in the film:
The main character in the film is the village. It was amazing, with ochre colours, that earth… it needed just a little bit of colour. We made the decision to borrow from the culture of all the Arab countries without betraying the unity of the Arab-Berber Moroccan whole. We used blues, yellows, oranges. The light was kind to all of the colours, the ochre, the walls, and skin tones as well.

Hafsia Herzi on her two roles in Apollonide and The Source:
These are both women’s films; the two films talk about a similar subject and paint a beautiful portrait of women. They both have love and sex. I played two very different characters. In Radu’s film, I’m a young, unmarried woman and I get in on the love strike. In Bertrand Bonello’s film, I play a prostitute, a far cry from a love strike!