The film began in Sweden. The country itself was an important component for me. I had already made two shorts there. I wanted to shoot my first feature in a world I know well, albeit a world in which I don't fully grasp all the social codes. My mother is Swedish and every summer when I return to the family homestead on an island in the Gothenburg archipelago, I have the sensation that my view of the island and the country is new and fresh–Director Anna Novion

Cannes Film Fest 2008–Interview with Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, co-directors of “Lorna's Silence,” which played in Competition and won the Jury's Screenplay Award: “We shot in Seraing, a few miles away from the industrial town where we spent our childhood and shot our previous movies. We agree that Li?®ge is a bigger city, with plenty of people in the streets during the daytime as well as in the evening. For Lorna, the main character, who comes from Albania, a big European city embodies all sorts of hope. We also wanted to see Lorna in the midst of the crowd, people physically close to her but who knew nothing of her secret.

HIGH SCHOOL was very important to me while I wrote the treatment for AFTERSCHOOL—the name of the audio–visual teacher in my film was named after Wiseman and in some ways I feel like I shot AFTERSCHOOL like a documentary. I noticed the way teachers talked to the kids in HIGH SCHOOL, the way they reprimanded them and the way they infused their speech with the morality of the day and the values of the school. I loved how the film was just full of conversations—but at that the same time no one really seemed to be communicating. No one was getting through to each other. Wiseman's film NEAR DEATH was crucial for me because it was a great document on how people talk about death–the colloquialisms and cliche phrases that appear over and over when people grapple with mortality and loss–Antonio Campos

Cannes Film Fest 2008–This relationship between life and earth, war and peace, past and future creates a lot of absurdities in the lives of people in my country. It creates a lot of questions but gives no answers. Pain and joy, love and hate, east and west are all happening and clashing at the same time. All this makes my country Bosnia and its people very special, but it is not always easy to fins a way out of postwar confusion and injustice. It is not easy to have dreams and believe they can come true–Director Aida Begic.