A Love Story

The Oscar-winning director Asif Kapadia grapples with timeless themes of love, religion and war in his first narrative feature in almost 10 years, the epic 'Ali and Nino'. Nev Piece went on set in Baku to meet its two stars.

Portraits by WILLIAM SELDEN

In the Old Town in Azerbaijan’s capital, it does feel as if you have stepped back in time. As long as you don’t look up. Outside of these few blocks you can see a sharp tower piercing the sky. One of the visual effects team on this film is taking photographs, for reference, so they can work to digitally remove it.

Ali and Nino is an early 20th-century novel of longing and loss and rapturous romance. But while Baku retains much of its long-standing charm, the city is more modern than new visitors might expect. The filmmakers have to obscure freshly minted buildings and transport us back in time – though the story’s themes of love transcending race or religion, politics crushing people and, well, vengeance, remain timely.

Published in 1937, under the pseudonym Kurban Said (the identity of its true author is disputed), Ali and Nino follows the titular couple as they are united by love and divided by culture and conflict. Ali Khan (Adam Bakri) is an Azerbaijani Muslim determined to marry his childhood sweetheart, the Georgian Christian Nino Kipiani (María Valverde). But as well as tradition, they have politics against them – the First World War and the battle for control of the oil-rich country. There is personal passion but also national duty to consider – the fight for Azerbaijan’s independence.

“It’s kind of a cultural treasure,” says producer Kris Thykier, of the novel. “There aren’t many books that you come across where you think, ‘Oh, not only does it have a place in the world literary canon but it also has a particular place in a nation’s heart.’ It’s a very beautiful, evocative book.” Thykier hired Dangerous Liaisons scribe Christopher Hampton to write the screenplay – a tricky process, of 12 drafts, during which the producer searched for the right director to bring the words to life. “I needed to find somebody who was a ‘heart’ director,” says Thykier. “There are a lot of cerebral directors out there but there has been a move away from raw emotion and I needed someone who was rawly emotional.” The search led him to Asif Kapadia, who frst came to attention for his 2001 adventure The Warrior, but has latterly found success with documentaries Senna and the Oscarwinning Amy. “Kris approached me and I read the book,” recalls Kapadia, “And after the frst 100 pages I remember thinking, ‘Not much is happening here...’ and then in the last 50 to 60 pages huge things started happening. I was moved by it. It’s a love story. It’s a Muslim boy, a Christian girl. It’s East meets West. It’s where Russia meets Persia. It’s a romantic flm. It’s a war movie. It’s an action movie. And it was also interesting to see this big event – the First World War, the Great War – from an Asian perspective, essentially. This idea of religion, mixed relationships, oil, occupation – all this stuff seemed quite relevant to the world we’re living in now.”

Often I like the masculine roles, but Nino is on of my heroes.

María Valverde agrees: “I think you realize when you’re doing period flms that they’re not very far away from your reality.” The Exodus: Gods and Kings actress gave – according to Kapadia – the most “moving” audition and immersed herself in Azerbaijan, to try to capture the spirit of Nino. “As the country didn’t gain independence until just over two decades ago,” she says, “we’re living through change. It’s beautiful.”

You want to affect people so that in a week or two’s time they’re still thinking about it. I don’t think the immediate impression after a film ends is the most important thing. You want it to resonate.

That change may be beautiful culturally, but – as with the tall buildings near the Old Town – it does present certain practical problems. “I didn’t expect the modern skyscrapers and stuff,” says Kapadia. “It was quite a challenge, because I’d go and see a great location and come back a couple of months later and there’d be a new building there! Baku does have an old part, but a lot of that is being cleaned up to match the really, really ultra modern. But the landscape outside Baku was amazing – I thought, when I saw it, ‘This could be a real epic movie’.” Whether standing in the Old Town witnessing a key bit of action – which we won’t reveal here for fear of spoiling the story – or in the middle of an oil feld on the outskirts of the city, it’s easy to sense the scale of Ali and Nino. The sense of a large canvas – a flm that feels old fashioned, in the best sense. Tonally touchstones were Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago – flms made by that master of epic romance, David Lean. “It’s a big flm, like that – the kind of flm people don’t really do anymore,” says Kapadia. “And when you get the opportunity to do that, you think: it’s gonna be hard work, it’s gonna be a challenge – but you want to challenge yourself.”

Not that Kapadia is putting himself in the same bracket as one of Britain’s greatest ever directors. He just loves those flms. And wants people to walk out of the cinema feeling it’s been worthwhile. “You want to affect people so that in a week or two’s time they’re still thinking about it. I don’t think the immediate impression after a flm ends is the most important thing. You want it to resonate. And for the audience to kind of suddenly see the world in a slightly different way, I hope. In the case with Ali and Nino I hope they’ll see a part of the world that people have a preconception of – and realize actually it’s so different. It’s an interesting place and an interesting moment in time. And in some way it was quite ahead of a lot of the world. If you think about the relationships that people used to have and how they lived a hundred years ago. And how, sadly, in so much of the world, we haven’t actually made much progress…”