Filmmakers Salvatore Scarpa & Max Burgoyne-Moore On Capturing The Reality Of Immigrant Children In ‘Largo’ Short Film

Resilience in the face of hopelessness is at the center of co-writer and co-directing duo Salvatore Scarpa and Max Burgoyne-Moore’s short film Largo. The 19-minute drama, which was shown at this year’s HollyShorts Film Festival, follows Musa (Zack Elsokari), a young Syrian refugee living in the U.K.who still desperately awaits his parents’ arrival. However, his patience begins to wear thin with each insult about immigrants and his native language thrown his way from the local townsfolk, and even children his age. When Musa’s new guardian (Tamsin Greig) is unable to give answers about his seafaring parents’ whereabouts, he decides to take matters into his own hands by finding a boat and sailing out into the unsafe waters to reunite with them.

Below, the filmmakers talk about the importance of telling immigrant stories and fun behind the scenes challenges.

DEADLINE: What inspired you to tell the story of Largo?

SALVATORE SCARPA: We were kind of feeling disheartened by the reaction to the refugee crisis in the towns we’re from.

MAX BURGOYNE-MOORE: In Italy and in the U.K.

SCARPA: We were seeing people we recognized as friendly and welcoming having these strange, negative reactions towards people who were in need of a safe place. 

BURGOYNE-MOORE: Finding out that people in your extended family are racist when you didn’t realize that before is the short version of why we wanted to make this short film.

SCARPA: And on top of that, the statistics in the news have felt overwhelming for the past 10 years, basically when we started talking about writing this. This was a way to try and tell a human story behind those statistics.

BURGOYNE-MOORE: It’s very dehumanizing and numbing the way that the news, the media, and the government talks about refugees. It’s very facts and figures, and there’s no human element to it, which is crazy because these are people just trying to find safety and freedom, and they’re treated like a political goalpost for either side to argue about.

SCARPA: It was also about experiencing this feeling of being powerless to do anything about the situation because these numbers are so huge. At the end of the film, we placed the statistics that read there are 11 million child refugees. That’s really hard to comprehend when you see it written down. That’s an overwhelming number. So, it’s the powerlessness to be able to actually do anything impactful that inspired us to tell the story.

DEADLINE: Who did you work with regarding research? 

BURGOYNE-MOORE: One of the big helps, research-wise, was the Refugee Council, which is a big charity in the U.K. They give legal aid and services for refugees and immigrants who need help, and they really helped with making sure all the facts and figures and just the mechanics of whether a child could be fostered in that sort of situation. And then we had help from Good Chance, a refugee-focused theatre company. They helped us get people who have lived experience as refugees into paid positions because it was quite difficult for them to get paid work because of the Visa rules.

We also have people who are refugees in every department of the film, which is really cool. It’s nice to make a sort of tangible difference to people’s lives and give them that way into the British film industry, but it also meant that they were there to keep us authentic and tweak the details. 

Ammar [Haj Ahmad], one of the actors, helped coach Zack [Elsokari], the lead actor, to have a Syrian accent for his Arabic because Zack is Arabic, but it was a slightly different dialect. And having him there to do those tiny details that we would’ve missed. This collaboration between everyone meant the whole project had the right feel and authenticity to it. 

DEADLINE: The cinematography is great.

SCARPA: We got so lucky finding Rick Joaquim. Big shout-out to him. His ability to understand what was going on in our heads was so amazing. Very early on, he came on board. We met with him and started discussing references, and we were on the same page from day one. He knew everything that we loved, and he loved it too.

BURGOYNE-MOORE: Every crazy idea we had, he knew how to execute it and make it look epic – even though this is a small-budget film.

SCARPA: He had some amazing, creative ideas. He was always offering options for us. We just got super lucky. We had this idea from day one to shoot from Musa’s perspective, keeping the camera at eye level for the child. So, that was one thing we were able to just go with Rick and be like, “Let’s do this, and now let’s experiment with this. How can we play with it?” You can see all the epic-ness of the stuff in the sea. He smashed it.

DEADLINE: How’d you go about finding Zack and collaborating with him? 

BURGOYNE-MOORE: Yeah, he was 10 years old when we filmed. This was his first role. He’d done some other stuff before, which didn’t get released, but this was his first lead thing. From day one, we saw his audition tape, and it was clear he had something special. We went with our casting director, Nick Hockaday, who did a huge search. Ironically, Zack was one of the very first tapes we saw, and we couldn’t really believe our luck.

SCARPA: What a rare talent he is. 

BURGOYNE-MOORE: We were looking for a kid who felt world-weary.

SCARPA: Right, he needed to feel like he was forced to age before his time. So, we needed a little old man. And that’s the way we put it to him. On top of that, we were shooting on such a short schedule; we needed a kid who was clearly intuitive, comfortable on set, and could also do all of the stunts at sea. 

BURGOYNE-MOORE: And then obviously the kid we were looking for had to be from the right region and be able to speak the language. We are so lucky to have got him, and he’s the star of the show. He was delightful to work with. He came to our first meeting, knowing most of the script, and had questions about his backstory. He wanted to talk to us about the subject matter. He’s very emotionally intelligent and made our jobs very easy. 

SCARPA: Also, because he had to play these nuanced and emotional moments, we were lucky to have his mother [Houda Echouafni] on set as a chaperone and a [makeshift] acting coach – she cameos as the mother in the film.  She was able to get some silent and heavy moments across.

DEADLINE: In the film, you have Musa interact with a man of his culture named Hakim, but his boss calls him Harry, who is jaded by the assimilation he has to do in white culture. Meanwhile, Musa is being raised by a white woman, who doesn’t really try to whitewash him, but still has difficulty with other white people in the town who know she’s harboring an immigrant child. 

SCARPA: We are not refugees. We haven’t had that lived experience, but we grew up around the people, like the fishermen that you see in the film. We spoke about this briefly. We were very disheartened by [racist remarks] and confused by that reaction. And those moments for us were important because they are brushed off as just a joke. Those moments of racism are very heavy—this idea that you have to kind of forget where you are from to fit in and become what they wanted Harry/Hakim to become. So, it’s foreshadowing to what Musa’s life could be like and the things he would have to forfeit to fit in. It was really important for us to have that moment of him meeting with Hakim.

BURGOYNE-MOORE: It helps with the push and pull of the film. It can’t just be racism that makes the kid want to leave. It can’t just be that he misses his parents; that’s the pull, and that’s the push. It helps to have him see that the way he could assimilate, as you put it, is sort of tragic, and he would have to lose parts of his identity that he doesn’t want to lose. And so that makes trying this crazy thing of building a boat and going out to sea, even though, as one of the other kids points out, “How are you going to find them?” it makes it like he has no other option. This is the only way he can be true to himself.

DEADLINE: Let’s talk about that boat scene. What were some of the challenges? 

SCARPA: When we put it on paper for the first time, we were very naive. We thought, “Yeah, we’ll shoot this on the water with a kid. Let’s just do it.” And we have to shout out Roy Taylor.

BURGOYNE-MOORE: A legend of stunt coordinating. The film he had done just before ours was Barbie.

SCARPA: He was out of our league. We just got very lucky that he was available and loved the project. For the boat scene, we wanted to get across this danger, and that was really the only way to do it – show up with the kid on the water. So, we had to have three boats because it was a complicated thing to orchestrate. 

BURGOYNE-MOORE: Our production designer, Joana [Dias], helped us be more practical. Originally, we thought, “Oh, we’ll have one boat.” We had found a boat around the corner from some house, saw it, and was like, “That’s the boat.” And then Joana was like, “Guys. You need a boat that looks like a 10-year-old made it, but needs to be safe enough that a 10-year-old actually did not make it. It needs to have a spare in case it sinks, and we lose it.” There were all these things. So, we ended up with three of them that are slightly different and have different safety features.

SCARPA: We’ve had a lot of people ask us if it’s CGI or if we did it in a pool or on a set. But no, we were in Seaford [East Essex, England] in the water where the cliffs were. We shot it right out in the water and not in the shallows.

BURGOYNE-MOORE: That opening shot where the kids first push off and he jumps in, Roy had come up to Zack and said, “Zack, to do this safely, we’re going to get down to the beach and then let the boat go in the water. You stay on dry land.”

SCARPA: Yeah, he said, “Whatever you do, do not try to do anything with the boat. Don’t go on the boat.”

BURGOYNE-MOORE: And then Zack went full Tom Cruise. That bit where he dives into the water, he just actually did it. Then, we shouted “cut,” and there were like 30 adults running into the water. Meanwhile, his mom is having a heart attack behind the camera. Luckily, Zack is a very confident swimmer. There were many stunt coordinators and safety people there who were all well looked after.