Based on Nicoletta Bortolotti’s novel Sulle Onde della Libertà, How Kids Roll [+lire aussi :
interview : Loris Lai
fiche film] is set in the Gaza Strip during the second uprising in 2003, where a Palestinian child and an Israeli boy are united by their love of surfing. We chatted with the director Loris Lai on the occasion of a Special Screening of the film in the 30th Linea D’Ombra Festival in Salerno.

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Cineuropa: In light of the events which followed on from 7 October 2023, talking about children in Gaza has an even greater impact, given an estimated 20,000+ children have now been killed in the Strip. Why did you choose to explore Gaza from a child’s viewpoint?
Lori Lai: Because children take you to a borderless dimension and they’re the real victims of war because they don’t make any decisions. They just live their lives, absorbing whatever the adults decide to do. When 7 October happened, the film was pretty much ready, we were just waiting for one or two sections in post-production. There are now upwards of 50 active wars around the world, and their viewpoint encouraged us to amplify that message. The message conveyed by the children in the film is about coexistence, because on an instinctive level they manage to find a way to break down the barriers built by adults.

Would you say an impossible, almost Shakespearian friendship lies at the heart of the film?
It does. When I read Nicoletta Bortolotti’s novel, which is a beautiful children’s book which was written to explain to young people what was happening in those places in a far more poetic way, I was struck by that Shakespearian archetype, a friendship that was impossible, just like Romeo and Juliette’s love. Thanks to their shared love of surfing, the two children realise they’re not actually that different, but they’re destined by birth to hate one another.

In the past, you’ve worked as a photojournalist in Gaza. How did your experience on the ground influence your mise en scène style?
As a filmmaker, I’m convinced that there’s a right way to tell every single story. In this film, there are two filming styles. One is with a handheld camera, to convey the tension inside the city. But when we’re on the beach, the camera becomes softer and more measured, because this is the place where the protagonists are safe, where they’re doing what they love. There’s the same contrast in the film’s photography too: in the city, colours are stronger and clearer, whereas elsewhere we see more pastel shades. We wanted to try to convey that dichotomy between the city and the beach.

The film is steeped in realism, but it also has dreamlike moments. Is this something you added yourself or was it transposed from the original text?
No, I added it in, it’s part of my style. I introduced it because the children in those places – and I’ve spoken to them personally, having been there three times – demonstrate a staggering level of pragmatism. They’re aware of what’s happening around them, they say “we know when we go to sleep, but we also know we might never wake up again”. But they also say they’re not scared, because they don’t know anything different from that reality. The dreamlike part is the subconscious of the child who has to face reality like that, but obviously the hate that’s all around them is also absorbed subconsciously. I think that one of the biggest problems for children living in situations of war is the terrible baggage they carry inside of them. If they do manage to survive, they grow up with a deep-rooted hate inside of them, because it might be that their dad or mum have been killed, or they’ve lost an arm or a leg. It’s a never-ending cycle: hate breeds hate, and they need to be helped with this because they’re the future.

How did you find your two leading children? And how did they interact on set?
The casting process kicked off in Europe and then we extended our search from Lebanon to Egypt, and obviously Israel, Palestine and Jordan. In the end, we focused on the West Bank, and on Jenin in particular, and that’s where we found almost all of the children in the film. But the Israeli boy comes from Tel Aviv. As for their relationship, to begin with they were very wary of one another because the Palestinian boy does actually come from an Arab village near Gaza, and most of his family still live in the Strip. They didn’t speak to one another. But then, as the days went by, the children were “forced” to film those scenes together and, slowly, just like in the film, they realised that they weren’t very different at all. They grew closer, they became friends, and their mums did too, as a result.