Kata, I understand that this film is to a certain extent autobiographical or at least based on some of your mother's experiences? 

Kata: Starting in ’45 in Budapest, from that point the story is inspired by my mother's story, and then in the Berlin section it is based on our and our friends’ experiences moving to Berlin. It was a really interesting time for us when we left Hungary; moving to a new country makes you redefine your and your family’s identity. This period is filled with experiences like when I tried to find a Jewish kindergarten and then I couldn't prove we were Jewish due to the fake documents. This transition coincided with the time when my mother got really sick, that is why this topic felt really important to me at that time, it was like a mirror for me. Upon her passing, this became essential to me to discuss the subject.

This film has a really interesting perspective on being Jewish in modern Germany - the country prides itself on the reparations for the Jewish community, but I hadn't really thought until watching this film that if you don't have the paperwork, it can be a problem...

Kata: My mother had five birth certificates and they were all fake. I just felt I had so many question marks on these topics, but our move to Germany presented us with a set of new questions as well. The Berlin events in the film are inspired by real life events. We experienced that there is a certain fear that surrounds the subject in the current German society, but we didn’t want to portray a perspective that looks for answers in the past, but a contemporary one. Our main focus is what is the identity we pass on to the next generation, to our children.

Kornél: While I’m not Jewish, I have three Jewish kids, so I am part of this as well. The extensive research for both the first and second part was a very interesting part to me. These sections are completely defined by contradictions and untold stories that resonate with the history of eastern-European Jews who stayed in their homelands during the communism.  The Berlin part of the story is also connected to these from many different aspects. When we went to Berlin, we started to realise that those questions we're tackling in the earlier parts of the film are way more complex today in Berlin that we anticipated.

Tell me about the evolution of the script - I know there was a theater piece that is related, could you tell me a bit about that?

Kornél: We did a “music theater” as the Germans say roughly three years ago, which was sort of a musical installation for a classical concert for Ligeti's Requiem that we created with Proton Theatre for the Ruhrtiennale. There was a hundred-piece orchestra and a hundred-person choir on stage as well, so it was very different. We had a dialogue, but it wasn’t a stage play per se.

So if you started this a few years ago, how did the pandemic affect the film? Did you shoot before things shut down?

Kornél: We shot in April and May this year over only 13 days in the pandemic, seven days in Budapest and six days in Germany, and that was it, so I mean it's a tiny shooting.

Kata: We always knew it was going to be really special, it's not like a typical feature. We were jumping into the deep water and it felt like a free fall… we knew it would be tough but we had to try anyway.

Because the film is structured in a triptych, I do want to ask about the sections. The first part is absolutely creepy, surreal, nightmarish. Talk to me about the process when you're deciding how that's going to come together, where those nightmare images came from, and was it in fact all done in one shot?

Kornél: Yes, it’s all one shot until the one moment when we go outside. Our concept was very basic: we wanted to capture the trauma’s poetic and surrealistic essence on screen, the fear, and the feeling that haunts one person. This is what ties us to the second part.

Kata: You don't want to express the horrors of the inexpressible. But it is a huge reference point for the following generations represented in the film, so you have to find your relation to it somehow.

Kornél: I remember reading a book by Imre Kertész, it fascinated me how he reports in his novel about the Polish Red Cross cleaning the camps after the liberation. During their mission they found a couple dozen children in the camp and after doing research on it, it provided a perfect starting point for our movie.

It's impossible not to think about this first scene, and the scene from your last film, Oscar-nominated Pieces of a Woman, because they are almost mirrors of each other. In that film, there’s a big one-take birth scene that opens the film, and with this film it begins in chaos and darkness, and ends with a birth in a way - a baby coming out of the floor. There are also some connections like the mother character in that film, the two films do talk to one another a little bit.

Kornél: In Evolution, we wanted to film this miracle, to have this as the emotional core of the film which is finding a survivor, a baby. It’s absurd and surrealistic to think that they actually found babies alive in the camp after the liberation. For us, something we wanted to explore more in depth after Pieces of a Woman was how these kinds of traumas persist in-between generations, and we felt that there was still space to talk about it.

Kata: I also wanted to make a memento to a generation that we are losing right now - these days are the last days we can talk to people who were there and survived and can talk about their past, so it was really important for me to put this into words. 

Tell me a little bit about the casting, particularly of the mother in part two - she gives just an extraordinary performance and imagine it was very difficult because of the long takes, the camera's doing this choreographed dance and it’s a lot of dialogue.

Kornél: Lili Monori is an icon and a genius - I have worked with her for the past 10 years. Mostly on stage, but she was in White God and  Delta as well. This is her first significant role in a movie of mine. In the past she did also work with Isabelle Huppert, and she was kind of an iconic indie star in the communist Hungary, while also being an outsider. She told me at the start that she could not imagine the sequence as shot-by-shot. She just asked me to give her the final text a month before the shoot and she just came fully prepared to do the take. There is only one seam right before the water bursts out into the apartment, but the rest 36-and-a-half minutes is a real long take, everything is real. We shot this section for three days, every day doing about three takes, four max - 13 takes altogether. The last one is the one in the movie.

Let’s talk about your style, the camera kind of floats, and of course the long takes.

Kornél: I have always wanted to make a movie with a frozen camera and without music but at the end, we always move the camera and get music in {laughs} because... I really like spiritual camerawork, when you can’t anticipate exactly what is going to happen. You get a sense of freedom in the concentration. From my perspective as a director, this adds intimacy and tenderness - it's not logged, the actor can react, but at the same time, it's not this kind of hand-held-ish thing which is pretty far from what I do.

So you’ve found a balance between these. I imagine for your camera operators, you can't just hire anybody. You've got to hire people that really know how to do this - tell me about working with your DPs.

Kornél: Yorick Le Saux, who is basically a star DP, agreed to do this with us and I appreciate it so much that he's picked this little movie during the pandemic. He really was operating himself step-by-step, and sometimes he wasn’t sure he could do it. In the end he said, “when I was in the long shot, when I was part of the spirit or body of the actors and acting, I was inside and I didn't feel how difficult it actually was.” It was down to the endorphins, or something, but he made it happen.

Some of the stories that the mother is telling, of what she endured as a baby, some of those are very upsetting stories. There is a story that one of the survivors tells in The Four Sisters by Claude Lanzmann, which reminded me a little bit of these stories. Were these, Kata, things that you heard from your mother?

Kata: In regards to the tragic events of WWII, we didn't want to get down to one specific character’s story, but of many. I talked with experts, I visited the archives and collected stories to make this new story a composition of many people's experiences. But then, once we are back in Hungary in the second part, those stories come from my mother majorly.

I think it's really interesting how one can relate to something that they never experienced themselves. It's the focal topic of the film - can something that you never experienced yourself have extreme power over your life, your childhood? I never thought of it when I was young, hearing these stories and getting to know my mom's story; but when she passed away, I had to face the fact that these are things that really shaped my life in many ways.

To wrap up, is there anything else you want to say about the film ahead of its premiere?

Kornél: In the scope of our career, this movie was really unique and we enjoyed having the space to make it. The experience was really interesting and very personal. We hope it provides a little bit of our perspective on these ideas and issues we’re facing in our own lives. When looking at personal history, so many more complexities come to the surface as opposed to analyzing the big picture - we wanted to show an example for this as well.