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• INTERVIEW: Jean Paul Civeyrac

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INTERVIEW: Jean Paul Civeyrac

All human beings have their ghosts and French filmmaker Jean Paul Civeyrac is no exception. The peculiarity in his case is that he decided to give form, name and function to the specters that haunt the living and to present them as characters in some of his ten films, among short and feature length films, eight of which are in the retrospective of the 31st Mostra. Even though the “apparitions” are not a permanent resource of the director, they become an effective mark of a cinema of the author’s personality. “At first, it was the symbolism that I found in order to not make realistic cinema, which interested me only at the beginning, but which no longer motivates me,” explained the director in an interview for the Mostra. “Ghosts are in my cinema to represent principally a metaphor to which the strength of love can take someone.”

The realistic key to which the director refers is in his debut short film, Life According to Luc (1991), final course project at the school known as La Fémis, where he is a professor, and in his first feature length film, Neither Eve nor Adam (1996). This was based on what the French call “fait divers”, sensationalist news published by the press. But already in his previous short film, Civeyrac remembers that the night dreams of the male prostitute of the title forecast the existence of fantastic beings, which only really appeared in Les Solitaires. The director’s second feature length film, made in 1999, the film is a model in many ways of the work that was to come, beginning with the plot. Pierre, a recent widower, is the representative of a characteristic lineage of characters in Civeyrac’s cinema. They are people who, like him, have lost a loved one – father, mother, or love, and unable to overcome the loss, are sometimes consoled by a vision of the person they miss the most. In other words, the use of the supernatural is directly linked to love. This is the conductor par excellence of Civeyrac’s cinema; that feeling can be depicted based on mythology, like the updated story of Orpheus and Eurydice of the short film Tristesse Beau Visage, or of a novel about an errant sentimental person like “Penses-tu Réussir!” (1897), by Jean Tinan, adapted for Man’s Gentle Love.

This resource, confirmed and evidenced based on the title of Fantômes (2000), is not always immediately unveiled by the audience. The secret, literally to the soul of the business here, allows Civeyrac to little by little expose the feeling and the reason for this supernatural appeal. “There are some issues relative to humanity that are hard to share with the audience. I believe, for example, in a co-existence between the past and the present and the ghost materializes this aspect very well,” Civeyrac also explained. He remembered that in addition to touching moments of his life, when he lost his mother and a grandmother, Asian literature and cinema also contributed for the appearance of ghosts. “They are common figures, for example, in Japanese cinema, which I like a lot, especially in that of (Kenji) Mizoguchi”, he remembered.

The symbolism proposed by the director might sound only enigmatic or fragile if it weren’t for the elaboration of a sophisticated and small mise en scène. His scenes are almost always closed places that are invaded by a minimum of light, where four or fewer characters live out their conflicts. The degree varies from the radicalness of a drama like that presented in Les Solitaires, staged - it is worth taking the theatrical sense of the term - a good part of the time by two brothers in a Parisian cubicle and once in a while by two other characters, at exterior moments that have little influence on the plot. It is not by chance that the first construction is the one dedicated to the characters who are tormented by pain, and therefore, receptive to the ghosts. “There are economic reasons for the choice of a single setting and few actors for those who, like me, have tight budgets,” pointed out the director. “But this option enables me to create an atmosphere that does not distract the audience from the essential, which is to share the suffering of the character, and this is done by coming up close to his face, accompanying his features and attitudes.”

It is inevitable to think about an approximation with the cinema of French filmmaker Robert Bresson, the director of absolute rigor and silence, who allowed the noise of the staging to be the only sound on the screen. Civeyrac admires Bresson, but prefers to be cautious in the comparison. “For me, there are two fathers of modern French cinema, generically speaking, who are Bresson and Maurice Pialat,” he commented. “I am the son of the first, certainly, but I think I keep a distance from his minimalist, dry cinema, insofar as I often adopt the baroque, like in À travers la Fôret”. The filmmaker says that he looks for purification in the process of the film itself, while Bresson would already put the purified film on the screen. Another point of separation is the use of music. The classic option for Johann Sebastian Bach or for the French baroque composer François Couperin is constant, more than in experimental contemporary production, like John Cage. The soundtrack ends up outlining its own universe in the film, separated from the events and characters: “I often edit the film together with the sound editing, with the external noises and with the music, so that they acquire a single body.”

Although aligned with very similar themes and style, the cinema of Civeyrac did not have its origin, according to him, from a premeditated conception that would make him equal, forming a single, closed work. “It was by chance, everything just came about little by little. I think each film has singular differences that suggest more realism or abstraction.” In his next film, the ghosts again move away to make room for another story that is making the rounds in French newspapers: There is an alarmingly high suicide rate among teenagers in France right now, and I will make a film based on the death of two of them in the French countryside.” He agrees, however, that there are also political and social ghosts that haunt as much as the personal ones.


INTERVIEW: Stefano Odoardi



“A film that deals with death to talk about life.” Despite fleeing from definitions, Italian director Stefano Odoardi believes that this is the best that fits that of his first feature film, A White Ballad, presented at the 31st Mostra. It is a non-conventional film, in which the capacity of reflecting on universal human aspects is a basic requirement for its understanding. Practically without dialogs, its narrative is centered on the consciousness flux of an elderly couple. They no longer speak to each other, do not touch each other, do not look at each other. They only seem to live through what seems to be the last days of their lives. “Or are they already dead?”, the director questioned during the interview with the Mostra.

Aware of the lack of linearity in his work, Odoardi believes that visual language does not always have to have a story. “I am not interested in telling something; my purpose is to evoke reflection within the spectator”, he provokes. “I think we only live, without paying attention to what this implies. Therefore, I don’t have to tell a story, but rather, show images that arise the interest in a discussion about the subject”, the director added.

In A White Ballad, words are said by isolated gestures. Time drags on and the innocuous silence of actions is only broken by a young woman who shouts, cries, speaks, but never divides the same scene of the couple. When resorting to words to express wills, desires and the actions of the elderly, Odoardi calls attention to the scene in which she starts to throw out clothes from the closet onto the floor. “There she demonstrates anger, revolt. It’s the level of sub-consciousness acting”, the director explains. “I know that a couple that does not talk is weird, but if we realize, we will see that they communicate at another level, which we are not accustomed to.”

It was a set of coincidences that made him decide to make the film, and one of them was the conversation he had with his shoemaker, who plays the elderly man. “We shared our feelings and ideas on the subject”, the director recalls. The film was produced with just 40,000 euros. Even when admitting to the difficulty in producing independently, he believes in commercial feasibility of art cinema. “If it were not commercial, it would not have stayed playing for seven weeks in Holland and it would not have been watched at the festivals where it already was exhibited.”

He claims to be surprised with the receptiveness of the Brazilian public and critics at the Mostra. “I think that here people still stop and reflect on human issues.” While staying in São Paulo, an old project of filming in Latin America should take place at the capital of São Paulo. He already is looking into the possibilities of co-producing with Brazil. The dramatic setting will be an 11-year-old boy and the shock between reality and the imaginary. But he already warns: “It will be a pessimistic movie.”


INTERVIEW:Vadim Glowna




An almost 70-year-old man seeks answers to a lonesome life, cultivated in memory of his wife and daughter killed 15 years ago. But he finds himself to be alive and before new possibilities after starting to attend a type of bordello where the girls only sleep. This is Edmond’s story in House of the Sleeping Beauty, presented at the 31st Mostra, a film written, produced, interpreted and directed by German Vadim Glowna and inspired by the homonym book by Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabat, published in 1961. “The difference is that I took the liberty of making some changes to adapt it to German reality, I added two characters that did not exist in the book and added to the central character a taste of my own life experiences”, Glowna said during his interview for the Mostra.

It is a film that has few dialogues and many monologues, where thoughts, issues and uneasiness are exposed before the inevitable: death. “I think that this is a characteristic of those who start to age and realize that many people you know both friends and family members, disappear and you start dealing with this issue in a way that you did not when you were in your 20s or 30s”, he pondered.

The bordello, managed by a woman who is dedicated to elderly men, was suggested by a friend of Edmond, Goki, who jokes to be divine and takes in his own hands the destiny of his friend. There, these men can feel warm and comfortable embracing youth and the beauty of these women. They cannot wake up because they are under the influence of drugs.

“During every visit, the house is a phase for Edmond in his search for answers to his questions, which ends up leading him to his love for women”, he stated. This love, however, is not carnal. According to the director’s view, it is the discovery of this feeling that perpetuates and is passed along. “Starting with his mother, who is the first woman in a man’s life”, Glowna affirmed. “He discovers that this love passes from the mother to the first girlfriend, to the second, to the wife, to the daughter and to these girls he did not know, even though he caresses their nude bodies.”
Glowna resorts to archetypes related to death in his characters. The driver, who takes him to the house of the sleeping beauties which always has the riverbank as a background, is a clear allusion to death’s boatman, eternalized by Dante Alighieri in “The Divine Comedy”; Goki is nothing but his own conscience and finally, a god; and Madame, the woman who takes care of the house, is death itself.

House of the Sleeping Beauty stayed on display for 18 weeks in Germany and shall return in the first semester of 2008. The public’s reaction was better than he had imagined. Contrary to the warning sounded by some of Glowna’s friends, who claimed that the film could create problems with feminists due to the explicit scenes of nude women, the result was positive. “Women understood the film much more than men”, I recalled. “Even German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, complimented and recommended the film”, he added. For Glowna, they realized that the film speaks of love, which birth and death reside in women. The feature film will start showing in Japan in December after which it moves on to the United States and Canada.

INTERVIEW: NICOLAS KLOTZ and ELISABETH PERCEVAL - A mechanical world under investigation



In the opening of Heartbeat Detector, the camera focuses on an African mask. It is a scene of Frenchman Nicolas Klotz’ film, an ironic symbol of the offices of a French subsidiary of a large German petrochemical corporation. What is seen after this brings to mind a type of tribe, with rules, codes, hierarchies, in fact, a unique culture. The characters are the executives who dress and behave themselves in a same way with the sole objective of competing and moving upwards in their professions. When they are outside of the territory of dispute, they also adopt a model to blow off the pressure from work at parties with plenty of electronic music, drugs and casual sex.

Simon (the splendid Mathieu Amalric) attends to all these principles of current corporate life, but with one peculiarity: he is the company’s psychologist, and partly responsible for the newly hired, but also for the overall balance, so to speak, of the employees. His rather delicate job is tested to the limit when Simon needs to investigate the possible insanity of the head of the subsidiary at the request of one of his closest executives. From this point on, to simply describe a single narrative line would soundly terribly simplistic. Klotz makes a complex unfolding between the new variants of the case and their consequences reflected in the vision and attitudes of Simon.

Heartbeat Detector is the epilogue of one of Klotz’ trilogies, formed by Pariah (2000) and The Wound (2004), shown in previous editions of the Mostra and both dealing with the topic of immigrants, or the outcast in a broader context, in France. Apparently, the new film seems to leave behind this universe and go in the opposite direction, to which thought Klotz prefers to give another understanding. “In the first two films, I talk about the poor, of those cast out of society and always doomed to a kind of social invisibility, but who can be seen on the street”, Klotz explained during his interview for the Mostra. “In this film, the focus is the world of the rich, that which oftentimes cannot be seen because it is closed about itself, which also dooms its characters to a type of exclusion; for me, both worlds and their problems stem from the same questionable reality”.

Scriptwriter Elisabeth Perceval, routine collaborator of Klotz and who has worked on an original story by François Emmanuel, complements by recalling that the two universes touch also themselves regarding the totalitarian concept that governs them: “In the case of a large company, this is at the extreme of mechanization that commands everybody’s lives, which idea is present throughout the film; as to the illegal immigrants, it’s a type of policy that constantly threatens them, takes advantage of the extreme fragility at hand”.

The totalitarianism concept does not come to scene by chance. There is a decisive message as the film progresses. As he furthers his investigation regarding the strange behavior of the company’s director, under the excuse of wanting to form an employee’s orchestra, the protagonist discovers alleged ties of the senior management with Nazism. At this time, Simon’s torment also grows and his view with regard to the universe in which he dwells changes. “This is why it is not possible to point out a single dramatic line of the film, about Nazism, the holocaust or the modern pressure of corporate life”, Elisabeth recalls. “The film does not stir up the past to seek out old wounds, but bases itself on the slow metamorphosis of a man that in the present clashes with the memories of older men on such a horror. In this sense, it is a generational film”.
For the director, the bond with Nazism in the story does not seek to reflect on that fact itself, which is the purpose of various other films that have been made, but rather, it intends to demonstrate that many extreme, conservative and chaotic attitudes expressed in a political model – in the broadest sense of the term, including the business one in the film – root back to that dark moment of History: “Movements such as capitalism, which arose from such confusing war instances, made us look at such conflicts today as being natural catastrophes; for me, the Second World War is the matrix of modern times, for good and for evil”.

One of the most efficient resources of the film, but also ambiguous, to distinguish the old order under discussion, the world about to crumble of the leader, and the new yuppie concept, exemplified by Simon, is the music. When assuming the task he has been assigned to, the psychologist discovers that in the past the leader formed a classical music quartet with some corporate colleagues, which information leads him in his investigation to the other members and is the theme for a soundtrack formed, for example, by compositions by Franz Schubert. For Simon’s world, electronic music contextualizes the search for throbbing emotions that are the opposite of the daily corporate strictness.

In this case, Klotz requested from his friend/group Syd Matters that he transform the texts of philosopher and dramatist Sêneca into music, besides including songs of the New Order. Elisabeth recalls that his character is amidst a hierarchy, that is, he is not an operator, a faceless person, an outcast, nor does he hold absolute power. This condition, together with the change in spirit due to the discoveries he makes, also required a specific musicality, which came in the form of sung and danced Spanish flamenco and Portuguese fado. “The entire film is based on the notion of past and present, and the music needed to follow such premise”, Klotz said.




INTERVIEW - Nino Leitner: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING!!!

If a picture worth a thousand words, be careful: it may say what you did and whom you were with. In London, where thousands of cameras watch the routine of almost 8 million inhabitants, this is already a reality. The title of most watched city in the world is no exaggeration, according to 24-years-old Austrian director Nino Leitner. In his first documentary, Every Step You Take, shown at the 31st Mostra, he deals with this issue that has divided specialists, authorities and those mostly interested: the population.

It was during an exchange period in London, while getting his Master’s in Multimedia Art at the University of Applied Sciences and Technologies in Salzburg that this topic raised the interest of the youngest director present at the Mostra. “I believe that the eye of a foreigner sees things from a different angle, differently from natives”.

The starting point was to compare the opinions that diverge between the British and Austrian population, since Austria is the European country having the smallest number of closed circuit TVs (CCTV) on the continent. The documentary shows the political use of surveillance by the government, which argues that this helps reduce terrorist attacks and crimes. “Such efficiency is questioned when proving that the cameras did not prevent the London underground attacks on July 7, 2005”, Leitner defends. “The system helps identify the criminals after the fact has occurred”, he adds.

Even though the cameras are spread across various parts of the city, in public buildings, pointing towards streets and subways, what mostly called Leitner’s attention was the surprise with which the British themselves watched the documentary: “Many were not aware of the extent of the degree of surveillance to which they are submitted.” Every Step You Take does not simply skim the surface of the matter but addresses also its various political, social and economic aspects.
In societies that are ever more dominated by the valuation of images, the presence of surveillance cameras makes each citizen become a character of a huge feature film that not always has a happy ending. “Since most cameras are placed high above, the view is limited, which prevents full visualization of the face and oftentimes causes identities to be mixed up”. A character of the documentary illustrates well this situation when he is taken for another person only because he is wearing a coat similar to that of the suspect.

The use of images captured by cameras during news reports, TV and websites also has a positive influence on public opinion. One thing is for sure: the increase in the use of surveillance cameras decreases the number of policemen on the street. “If on the one hand they invest billions in installing such equipment, on the other hand they save in hiring more police officers”, Leitner complements.

The documentary lacks referring to the assassination case of Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes by British police in July of 2005, who was taken for a terrorist. “Unfortunately, British authorities did not allow me to talk about this matter nor use any images related to this case”, the director complained. The documentary shall be presented in November to the Sheffield festival exhibitors market, in England: “I hope that TV channels take an interest in the matter so that a greater discussion arises, not just in British society, but in all other places that seek means of fighting against violence.”



Interview: Shawn Linden
DIRECTOR EXPERIMENTS WITH A MIXTURE OF GENRES

A film noir with touches of fantastic realism and ideas from science fiction and 1950s gangster movies. A mixture that works on the screen thanks to the talent of rookie Canadian director Shawn Linden. Nobody is the name of his first cinematographic work, present at the 31st Mostra. Aware of the difficulty people have in immediately understanding his film, Linden compares his work to books that do not seem very clear in the first pages, but which further on, show that they have an excellent story to tell. The first 20 minutes of the movie does not clarify very much about the direction the film will take. “When the audience realizes that the beginning is not really the start of the film is when their curiosity grabs them to find out how everything really did start”, explains Linden.

In Nobody, a masked murderer is led to commit a murder ordered by a Mafia boss. When the crime is declared a success, the paranoid Mafioso demands proof. The murderer flees through the dark streets during a harsh winter, but before he reaches a safe place, he is attacked, persecuted and injured by an assailant who seems to anticipate his moves. He escapes with his life, but a phone call from the mafia boss confirms the impossible: his mysterious victim is still alive.

The film works with the sensation of continuity of a story within others that, at a certain moment, cross each other and then move on. What appears to be just a movie about Mafiosos and murderers could be the nightmare of one of the characters. The great care taken with lighting and camera movements enriches the suspense and intrigue, which is stimulated by the soundtrack. “The movie was made using digital film and lighting was one of our concerns, to ensure that we didn’t run the risk of seeming like a homemade production, since film noir is made with strong contrasts of light”, explained the director. “The scenes were the result of a minute study of the locations so that we could take the best advantage of the sequence shots and value the cuts,” he explained. The movie, which cost US$ 100 thousand to make, was filmed entirely at night, when the temperature was 40 degrees Celsius below zero, in the Canadian city of Winnipeg.

Nobody has already made the rounds at eight festivals since it became ready in July of this year, and was indicated for prizes for actor (Costas Mandylor), director, best experimental project and best film at the Action on Film festival, in Long Beach, California. “My intention is to participate in festivals to see people’s reaction before selling the film to distributors.” So far, the public’s reaction has been positive for Linden. “In some cases, people who saw the first exhibition returned to see it again to try to catch something they missed in this puzzle,” said the director. “Definitely, this is not a film for everyone, but those who didn’t like it have been very polite to me, because nobody has said anything yet,” joked Linden.

The diversity of the audience during the first showing at Mostra caught the director’s attention, especially when a Philosophy professor asked him about the philosophical logistic behind the history of the film. As a good reader of existentialist philosophy, Linden’s answer came easily: “It is a handful of different religious ideas that end up cancelling one another within this denial that is present throughout the film,” he explained. Excited with the result of his first adventure as a filmmaker, Linden already has new projects in his hands to continue his career as a director: “This was always what I wanted to do and what I intend to keep doing.”



Simonee Chichester: Personal drama split opinions on documentary Chichester’s Choice

This is the story of a woman who leaves Canada for Brazil in search of her father who lives in the streets of the largest South American city since he abandoned her 23 years ago. A touching topic that any filmmaker would recognize as subject to cinematographic interest. But maybe it would take extra courage to make it if it were one’s real life story. Courage is something that Canadian born Brazilian Simonee Chichester proved to have abundantly when she exposed her drama on the screens in Chichester’s Choice, which is part of the 31st Mostra.

The documentary’s director, producer and character herself believes that many people would not make a personal film about this type of problem. “But when you work with art, you suppose that the story comes out better when you give more of yourself to it”, she explained. She had already worked with TV in Canada before having the idea of filming her own life story. “Hadn’t I made the film, I would never have gone so deeply into my father’s life and would have never reencountered my mother emotionally”. Simonee recognizes that it was no easy task to face her past and to abstain from him to generate a product that would later be shared with whoever wished to see it. “Many times, while I was in front of the camera as the daughter, I would forget for just a second that I was making a documentary and, when I remembered the film, I had to forget the emotional attachment of being a daughter”, she recalls. “Which in a way added balance to the film”, the director added.

It took four years since the project’s conception to its conclusion: “As in any and every independent production in which resources are scarce, we do things a step at a time.” Based on the result achieved during the last edition of Canada’s International Documentary Festival, Hot Docs, it was well worth the wait. The film was considered a Top 10 by the festival’s audience. It was recently presented at the Taiwan festival and is scheduled to be shown in December on Canada’s TVO, and in Israel, at the start of 2008. However, reactions to the documentary are adverse. Such diverging opinions are related to the film’s ending. “Some people did not know where I was coming from while others respected my choice and understood”.

As to the reaction in Brazil, Simonee hopes it will be balanced: “Regardless of the impression that people have of the film, it is important to know that I wanted to tell a true and universal story, even if nobody has a father living in the streets or who is an alcoholic. There will always be someone who is moved by my search for identity.”



Interview: Yoram Porath

A National Geographic photographer and editor for more than five years and currently a sporadic collaborator of the publication, Israeli Yoram Porath traveled the world seeking to record political, environmental and human rights issues. These travels included the Amazon, a very well-known region. But it was a Spanish friend who called his attention to the Indians of the Huaraoni tribes in Ecuador. In this part of the tropical forest, for at least four decades, about 1,500 suffer with the gradual destruction of their environmental paradise, due to the action of large petroleum companies from around the world. Porath went to this location and during four months recorded the difficulty of the clan to survive, due to waters polluted by oil and the consequent diseases and deaths, for the most due to cancer. The result is in his first documental feature film, Keepers of Eden, on display at the 31st Mostra.

The surprising vision that the maker had when coming to know the Huaraoni’s reality is now the main objective of his film: “Much is said about the destruction of the Amazon, whether by illegal occupants or by other problems, but this tragedy is unknown to the majority of people. With Brazilians, this is no different. This is why it is important to show the film here”, the director stated in his exclusive interview with the Mostra. Porath first exposes the spectator to the setting in which the Huaraoni are based, their customs, how they make hunting darts, their tales, such as a curious bond with butterflies, that guide tribe members about the forest: “I made a point of showing this paradise in which they live, naked and in complete harmony with nature, and their mythology which is so rich, in order to give a taste of what petroleum explorers are destroying”.

From there on, the film carries on in a historic progression. The documentary addresses all the way back since the first foreign company that broke ground in the region forty years ago and the appearance of pipelines slashing across the Indian reserve, including through sacred grounds, up to the unbelievable number of ten different brands that currently act in the area. Porath hears out the descendants of Indians who at that time accepted the arrival of the new “neighbors” by believing the tale that they would come to offer them a better life through enhanced health, education and infrastructure. “Ecuador is a country which economy is based on oil extraction, its greatest wealth. But parallel to this, it is a country with a history of weak governments, which were easily manipulated and pressured by large multinationals and their interests”, Porath recalls. This contradiction brought about by the director is confirmed by the statement a Natural History specialist regarding the ambiguity of the country’s laws relative to the preservation of Indian life and of nature and the occupation by petroleum exploiters. The same Constitution that protects the Huaraoni and grants them rights on the debate about the use of their lands also assures free access to such corporations.

Accustomed to finding in the river their source of food, leisure and other habitual uses, such as daily bathing, the Indians gradually started perceiving that in these oil-tainted waters was the source of their health problems. A water analysis done by an NGO detected high levels of petroleum-related hydrocarbons, magnesium and even arsenic. “From serious skin problems, the issue evolved to serious diseases and death by many types of cancer”, the director affirms. An alarming rate on cancer incidence among the tribe points out that there are 80% more cases there than in the capital Quito. Fish and large-sized animals such as pacas also pile up dead along the rivers’ shores. When confronting those responsible for the exploration companies, their employees at operational bases and directors sitting in offices miles away, Porath constantly hears the justification that the damages are very small, caused by factors other than the precautions that are taken. “It was necessary to embarrass them in order for them to realize the proportions of the tragedy”, says the actor.




Interview: Erik de Bruyn
Modern Women’s Conflict as the Backstage Setting

“To analyze the film merely as the story of a woman who kidnaps her ex-fiancé’s baby and flees to another country would mean to ignore the real motif that led me to make a feature film that addresses an evil of modern society, lack of women’s identity.” This is how the Dutch director and filmmaker Erik de Bruyn starts breaking down the essence of his film Nadine during an exclusive interview granted to the Mostra. The film, presented in the 31st Mostra, depicts the growing problem of modern societies in which women, who live in a post-feminist era, do not have to worry about fighting for their rights and find themselves divided between their careers and the need imposed upon them regarding motherhood. “I experienced this through my college friends with whom I still keep in touch and this is why I wanted to make a film that would reflect this problem.”

This is not the first time that the 45-year-old director addresses the quest for love, the fear of not having kids and of growing old. In Wild Mussels, his first feature film, which was part of the 26th Mostra, the emptying and the feeling that happiness is a long path to tread is a bridge with Nadine. Among the cinematographic references that the Dutch director sought to bring about the emotion discussed in this movie is British filmmaker Nicolas Roeg, mainly in his works “Bad Timing” (1980) and “Eureka” (1984).

Three actresses interpret the central character during the film, which communicates with spectators by means of life fragments presented as flashbacks and of its interior monologues. “I believe that women are the only biological creatures capable of changing physically, emotionally and mentally, and when I wrote the script a realized that that character at that time could be one, at another time be another person and during a third phase also be someone completely different”, explains the director, who justifies that the involvement with the matter is more important than the identification with the character.

When fleeing to Portugal, the protagonist, a 42-year-old woman who kidnaps the seven-month-old son of her ex-fiancé, whom she just met at a suburban supermarket, undergoes a crisis regarding her feelings and her real needs – that of having a child is one of them. It is not by chance that her first natural smile comes about on an Island along the Portuguese coast, when she finds herself accepted by a loving local with whom she becomes friends.

The film was made in 32 days, co-produced with Belgium and starts showing on October 25 in both countries. Regarding the reaction of the Brazilian public to the film, he considered it to be positive: “I hope that this is a good presage.” Just as in Latin America, moviemaking in Holland is also no easy task. The film relied on 1.5 million euros from the Dutch cinema fund after several frustrated attempts: “There are many filmmakers and too little available money”, he complains. Certain that the way out for worldwide cinema is in the hands of international co-producers, the Dutch director closed the interview with a hope that some day he will be able to make a film in partnership with Brazil.




Interview - Hideki Kitagawa:
Love and trauma in sophisticated images

“All good and original love stories have already been told; therefore, I had to seek my own path”. And the path for Japanese director Hideki Kitagawa, in his feature film debut at age 43, was to pick out a desperate love affair, an ongoing situation onscreen, and translate it into elaborate images that represent the ups and downs lived by the lovers. Love Runs Faster than Blood is made of dark settings that are almost unperceivable to the eye of the spectator, which depict the darkest and most daring moments of the characters, while the sparse moments of brightness mark the passages to freedom, which are equally rare.

Polarity is broken with the vision of blood, a symbolic element for the love story between a shy girl (Mihiro) traumatized by her father’s death and her being raped, and the artist (Kitagawa himself), who brings her under his wing and sooths her pain. “In order to be able to show onscreen a simply-set, strong but impressive story, I had to rely on the use of symbols; blood is the most overt of all”, said the director in an exclusive interview for the Mostra. “Besides this, I opted for very few cuts and brought dialogs to a minimum in order to add more value to the images”.

The sophistication and perfection of these images are oftentimes probably closer to video art than to cinema itself. Kitagawa believes in an unconscious and necessary approximation for what he sought for the film. Professor at the Tokyo College of Visual Arts and amateur painter and designer, Kitagawa justifies it as being natural that the film was first conceived as images to later become a script. “It was something that had been in my mind for quite some time and, for this very reason, it doesn’t always have a rational sense”, e explained. One example of this stored memory, he points out, is during the first minutes of the film, when the two lovers embrace inside a coffin. “All of us know that a coffin is just for one person, but there we see two, totally united, as if they were one”. This allusion to death repeats itself in the most delicate scene of the movie, and Kitagawa agrees: it is the moment when the gal is raped by her uncle under the bed on which lies the corpse of her father, killed just a few moments ago. Suddenly, the arm of the corpse reaches out and holds his daughter’s hand in despair. “It is one of those symbolic things that I told you about, this time in the form of a miracle”.

Even though the director believes that the allusions to visual arts are spontaneous, he admits that it was an attractive and comfortable universe to work with. “The mother of my father, who is a businessman, used to paint and developed in me an affinity for arts; the references are therefore mine, that which I personally like”. It is not by chance that the emblematic part of the film refers to “action painting”, one of the most vigorous painting movements of the 20th century, to synthesize the transitory condition of the characters from chaos to redemption. But instead of using a brush as an instrument to place paint on the canvas, as North-American Jackson Pollock would do, the protagonist uses the blood that gushes out of his pulse.

A typical independent production, Love Runs… was made with a crew of six people, all students of Kitagawa. After testing an actor for the main role, he decided that it would have to be himself for this performance. “It didn’t work out with the actor because I couldn’t express what I wanted in words, so I also stayed in front of the camera”. An admirer of fellow countryman Yasujiro Ozu and of the French Jacques Demy – whom he pays tribute by using in the soundtrack, besides the electronic sounds of Aphex Twin, songs from the film “La Baie des Anges”, of 1963 –, the director makes a point of stressing the photography work of the film, under Yasuhisa Yasaku’s lens. “It was a fundamental partnership for me to be able to translate into images what I did not wish to come out of the mouth of the actors”. He admits, though, that not all scenes allow the spectator to see what goes on between the protagonists. Some are in fact pitch black. “Many criticize the film for this, but I think there is a multitude of titles out there that show too much of what goes on; I wanted to stimulate the spectator’s imagination, deliberately create an ambiguity”, he claims.

Service:
Love Runs Faster Than Blood (Nov. 01, Reserva Cultural Room 1, at 10:30 p.m.)