Destaques > 30ª Mostra > 19/10/2006
Always Beautiful: An Open Letter by Manoel de Oliveira
Belle Toujours and Greetings
What is Belle Toujours? It’s my latest film. In 2001, I was invited to a festival in Mexico, and I really enjoyed being there.
I went to a Mayan museum and I was taken with this saying, so simple, and yet so clear and obvious:
“Plant so you can harvest. Harvest so you can eat. Eat so you can live.”
After reading this, never again have I missed a meal – something that I don’t regret at all.
As it happens, when I visited Mexico City I met up with a few people I knew, among them someone I hadn’t seen in a while, Bulle Ogier, and something even more unexpected happened: I, who never in my life had had the chance to personally meet Buñuel, suddenly find myself face to face with one of his children. In fact, he was just as charming and ironic as his father. That’s when the idea struck me: why not make a film in honor of Luis Buñuel? After all, he is a person I’ve always admired. It didn’t take me much time to dive into the idea that would make me think “what if I took two of Belle de Jour’s main characters and made them relive a specific situation, but thirty eight years later?” And so I did, I took two of the main characters – Severine and Husson. The result is this film, a homage to Buñuel and Carrière: Belle Toujours.
The S. Paulo Festival would have liked me to be present at the 30th Mostra Internacional de Cinema, but I have appointments that are impossible to postpone and therefore I will not be able to attend the event. Fortunately, I’ve scribbled a little something down on a piece of paper; the only possible way to be with you during the 30th Mostra.
I would like to greet the public and each and every spectator. I would also like to congratulate the Festival’s Organizing Commission as a proof of my enormous regret for not being able to be there with you.
Manoel de Oliveira