Three Kilometers To The End Of The World Director Emanuel Pârvu Wants You To Look At The World From A Different Perspective

Above the Palais du Festival is a terrace shaded by umbrellas and awnings from the midday sun in Cannes. The space looks out onto the expansive Gulf of Napoule on the French Riviera, and the atmosphere suits the film we’re here to discuss. Like the film, it’s soft and quiet, removed from, but still close enough to, a civilization moving at faster speeds. Set in a small Romanian village, Three Kilometres To The End of the World is about a 17-year-old boy who gets brutally attacked. Out of all the films I saw during my time at the Cannes Film Festival, it cinematically and symbolically felt the most intentional – and it was. Director Emanuel Pârvu spent a year thinking about the all little details — including the colors, sounds, textures, and decor — to bring his first Cannes film to life.

“I don’t think a movie, a film, or a book can change the world, but it can definitely raise questions. It can raise topics of discussion, it can draw attention,” Parvu said when speaking to the inspiration of the film itself, based on an actual case in Romania.

I sat down with first time actor Ciprian Chiujdea, who plays Adi, Bogdan Dumitrache who plays his father, and director Emanuel Pârvu to discuss their first experiences at Cannes Film Festival and what a good film can do for society. 

Pop Culture Planet: What inspired you to write this story? 

Pârvu: It was a real case in our country that, the producer and co-writer of the film, we heard it in the news and in the press. There was a rape case in a rural area in which the whole society turned against the victim. ‘She deserved to be raped. Look at the way she dresses.’ Why? Is this a real society? Are we a European country? Are you sure? Myself and our producer and co-writer Miruna Berescu, we’re both parents. We both have daughters. We have double perspective. We still have parents, so we’re still children of our parents, and we’re parents of our children. Are you sure this is the society we want our children to grow in? Do we want our children to live in this type of society? I don’t think a movie, a film, or a book can change the world, but definitely it can raise questions. It can raise topics of discussion, it can draw attention. I would never make a film a minority position. I’m in a privileged position. I have all the benefits. I’m white, European, a man. I cannot say their perspective. But I can say my perspective. From the aggressor point of view. My society is the aggressor. Let’s talk about how we can change things here. I don’t know how they feel, but I do know how badly my society treats them. From my position, I can say, ‘No, we’re wrong. Let’s change things here.’ I want to change things from my society. I think we must change things here, from the aggressive point of view. We all can live in happiness. There’s enough for everyone. God doesn’t ask you to be smart and make great films. He asks you to be good. That’s the only thing. Be good. To each other. Make as much good as you can around you. That’s the only thing. 

Pop Culture Planet: Your characters have such a strained relationship, but you can still obviously tell the love that’s underneath that. What did you learn about the nature of love and relationships from this project?

Bodgan Dumitrache: That’s a hard one. After the movie, the main concern was how can I be a better parent to my children? How can I not let society’s dynamics put pressure on my decisions to affect my relationships with my children and to build a stronger family? 

Ciprian Chiujdea: Snowballing off what he said, I’ve learned how to understand my parents better and to see beyond my perception of their actions. To actually see if they wanted to be mean to me or not, if they wanted to oppress me or not, if they held me back from getting more piercings or not.

Pop Culture Planet: The film deals with a lot of heavy topics, how do you come back to yourself after filming for the day?

Chiujdea: For the day? I don’t. Because it was my first film, and I don’t have that much experience on film, I tried to stay in character as much as I could. Emanuel feared this as well, which is why he wanted me on set every day even when I didn’t film, because that keeps me grounded, in character. In Romania, we call it “sauce,” stay in the same sauce so I don’t go back to myself, and go back to filming, and becoming the character again. That was my experience. 

Pop Culture Planet: And after filming? 

Chiujdea: After filming, I think for a month or two I was still dealing with Ciprian/Adi. It was such a powerful experience for me. We prepared for a whole summer. Getting to the point of getting to know Adi, and to feel like Adi, and to be Adi was a lot to come down from. 

Pop Culture Planet: What did you connect most with him? 

Chiujdea: Everything. I was Adi in high school, and I’ve been through that position. I didn’t get beaten up, but I actually for some time didn’t go to school because I couldn’t take it anymore. It wasn’t that bad, but it felt so awful being laughed at and pushed apart from the group. You feel like you don’t belong, even though of course, you do. You have people who support you. It was quite tough going back to what I felt and reliving it through this story. 

Pop Culture Planet: And Bogdan, what did you connect with most as the father, other than being a father yourself? 

Dumitrache: He was a very careful father. He was trying to do his best. He sacrificed himself for the sake of the children, which I would also do for my children. Being together [on set] for the whole month made us really a united team and kept us very close to the characters and the working process, so it was great to film in that location. We were like a sports team on a training field, so you can really focus on what you have to do. 

Pop Culture Planet: Emanuel, you shouted out your DOP yesterday. I’d love to talk to you about some of the thinking behind the fixed lenses. You had these moments where you had the cast move around, and you would cut them off a little bit, or their heads would be cut off. Can you talk a little bit about the thought process behind that? 

Emanuel Pârvu: This is my first film with a fixed camera. We’ve always shot with a handheld camera. This story, this rhythm, this pace, can’t be told with a handheld camera. You need to have a still camera so you can let the viewer explore everything that happens in the shot. We used wide lenses to be in contrast with the narrow minds from that society. It’s an influence we discussed a lot. We started most of the frames with the heads cut off intentionally wrong framed, but as the mise-en-scène goes along, you’re getting to the most important lines, through the mise-en-scène and then, at the end, you have the perfect shot. That’s also a tactic we talked about. How can we start this scene wrong? How can we end this scene perfectly? 

Pop Culture Planet: There is a lot of symbolism in the visuals. There’s a lot of light blue in the home, which I think symbolizes hope. And in the home as well, I think you hear a mourning dove. Is that correct? 

Pârvu: You hear a mourning dove and you also hear a metronome. You know that Chinese cat. The clock is ticking for the characters to make their decision. It gives a certain pace of making a decision. […] When something is ticking, is in your ear, that puts more pressure. 

Pop Culture Planet: So I feel good that I caught those, but are there any others that I missed that you wanted to emphasize? 

Pârvu: It was almost one year of planning with the DOP and the producer. The textures we picked for the characters… some textures reflect light, some absorb light. Some colors that put the character into the space and some colors define the character from the space. There’s only blue and green. Blue inside. Green outside. Green is the power of summer. Summer, in my opinion, is free. You have to free your mind of things. The final shot, it’s one shot, and when Adi leaves that space, that village. It starts in a narrow canal, taken in one take, then the canal opens up a bit, and then you just go free. Your horizon opens up. You go into the free world. A world where no one judges you, where people like to talk to you. There’s a place for everyone in our world.