Cinema without borders
Published 05 April, 2009, 14:25
A Kosovo-born actress says she faced tough challenges while working on The Silence of Lorna, the award-winning drama directed by acclaimed Belgium filmmaking duo ‘the Dardenne brothers’.
Arta Dobroshi plays an Albanian woman, Lorna, who lives in Belgium and dreams of opening up a bar with her boyfriend Sokol. To make her dream come true, Lorna has to obtain Belgian citizenship and turns to a gangster who sets up a false marriage for her. Yet what was hoped to be the solution to her problems turns out to be an endless nightmare for Lorna.
In an exclusive interview with RT, the actress said she was keen to find a key to her character.
“Lorna is very complicated. But it’s always very important for me to understand the character’s life in order to play it. There are many acting methods in cinema. As for me, I try to be as close as I can to the characters I’m portraying, diving into them. While working on The Silence of Lorna I tried to live like Lorna. So for five months I didn’t go out, I didn’t party, didn’t do anything she wouldn’t do.”
The 29-year-old actress was born in the capital of Kosovo, Pristina, and went through hard times with her country striving for independence in the nineties.
The Silence of Lorna won the prestigious award for Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival last year. Dobroshi says the script of The Silence of Lorna immediately appealed to her.
“I really liked it, because I think that Lorna’s nationality is not important in the film. Only her story, feelings and emotions matter. When you are an actor you are an actor – you are living other people’s lives. But I never experienced what Lorna did. I tried to analyze her life and not to compare it to mine.”
Dobroshi told RT that one of the several challenges she faced was not only that she was had to have her long fuzzy hair cut short, but Arta also had just two weeks to learn French from scratch to be able to star in the film.
However, Dobroshi says she got used to working hard and learning fast.
“Since I was 15 years old, I lived in America. We went there with my big brother because the situation in Kosovo was very bad. We spent a year there and then went to Albania.”
Dobroshi calls herself a citizen of the world.
“Now we’ve got our independence, but even before that I’ve always felt cosmopolitan. Since I was born I’ve never put any barriers in my head, I always thought that the world is very small and felt that nationality, religion or age don’t really matter when people want to achieve something.”
The actress admits she cares about politics.
“When I heard the speech of Obama when he won the presidential election, I had goose bumps, because what he said is exactly what we lived through and what we fought for. Just to be normal, no matter who you are and where you come from.”
Valeria Paikova, RT
discuss it
