Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir

Originally published on Ink 19 on November 20, 2023

Interview conducted by Lily and Generoso on Nov 14, 2023

In Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir’s debut feature, City of Wind (Ser ser salhi), the director provides us an opportunity to witness Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, at a critical point of transition through the interactions between the city and its rural outskirts with the film’s protagonist, Ze, a teenager reaching adulthood while also serving as his community’s shaman. Though her film is classifiable as a coming-of-age story, Purev-Ochir demonstrates impressive dramatic restraint throughout her film, allowing the contemporary and historical forces that are at play in Ulaanbaatar to flow with and against Ze at various points without causing any great battles or struggles while still encouraging a movement in action or perspective. One of the most important of these moments occurs early in the film and sets Ze on a path of quiet but substantial growth.

Ze’s mother has a friend with a daughter who is about to have invasive heart surgery. Before the procedure, the friend asks for a shaman visit from Ze, who kindly obliges. After bringing forth the grandfather spirit, Ze washes up, and his mother’s friend’s recently blessed daughter, Maralaa, confronts him and calls him a fraud. Despite this less than positive first encounter, Ze takes an interest in Maralaa and decides to visit her in his teenage schoolboy form after her surgery. The two become quick friends and then more, and as their relationship develops, we observe both Ze and Maralaa react to each other and the different spaces that they explore together such as a hyper-modern shopping mall, a semi-abandoned rooftop, and a pulsing, neon-lit nightclub, all representing facets of Ulaanbaatar’s urban center.

In contrast to his city experiences with Maralaa, Ze’s home life is more representative of a past that may be fleeting. He lives in an old Soviet-style building on the outskirts of town. And, nearby in a yurt that hearkens to the nomadic traditions of Mongolia, he performs and practices his shaman duties for his community. However, Ze does not visibly express any sense of angst in his polarized existence, and instead, he demonstrates a calm acceptance that both are parts of his reality that he wants to experience and must harmonize as he goes through moments of bliss, grief, heartbreak, and spiritual awakening.

We spoke with Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir over email about the early formation of City of Wind, her collaboration with Tergel Bold-Erdene for his Venice Film Festival award-winning performance as Ze, and the tensions of current day Mongolia that run throughout her film’s characters and surroundings.

LF: We understand that your short films were created after you wrote the script for City of Wind. Mountain Cat and Snow in September both examine teen mortality and sexual awakening and how they are influenced by both modernity and spirituality, all of which are themes within City of Wind. Did you discover anything new with these short films that helped you further develop your main characters of Ze and Maralaa in City of Wind immediately prior to or during filming?

LPO: Mountain Cat and Snow in September are directly and indirectly connected to City of Wind. Mountain Cat is the “proof of concept” for City of Wind. I had written the script and was looking for partners for the project. I made Mountain Cat to give an idea of location and characters because, generally speaking, readers had other ideas about Mongolia than what was presented in the script. It was also an exploration of Maralaa’s character, to see if I was interested in making the feature film from her perspective instead. After doing the short film, I was still interested in doing the feature from Ze’s perspective. At this stage, I also started thinking about the camera and how to explore space and character equally. I knew that I didn’t want to make a film that would follow the main character obsessively. I was keen on capturing a “space and time” that is today’s Ulaanbaatar while following Ze’s journey. With these thoughts in mind, we made Snow in September as a way to explore the other locations for City of Wind (i.e. Soviet buildings) as well as for me to explore my camera. It was like a practice run for Ze.

GF: Maralaa has an immediate aversion to Ze as shaman, and we also see Ze’s classmates mock him a bit about his gift too. Is Western influence the force in contemporary Mongolian society that is pushing young people away from the practice and ideas of shamanism? Or are there other forces at play?

LPO: It’s not Western influence per se. It’s the whole mosaic of our modern life which also includes the entirety of our past history. Mongolian shamanism has endured Buddhism, imperialism, communism, capitalism, and globalization. It is a part of Mongolian life that has been systematically destroyed by different forces and yet continues to endure in the lives of Mongolians. My attempt with this film was to show how shamanism manifests in the day-to-day existence of modern day Mongolians and how it endures in their emotional and psychological landscape too. Shamanism has been and continues to be the emotional support for Mongolians who are in need of care, especially the kind of care that contemporary Mongolian society is incapable of providing. The fact that Maralaa and Ze’s classmates are indifferent, and even at times hostile, to Ze’s shamanism is just part of the fabric of today’s Mongolia. It’s important to note here that I also show that, despite this indifference and hostility to shamanism, these young people, with their varied perspectives and varied tastes and varied dreams for the future, are capable of also forming deep and intimate relationships with each other. Modern day Mongolia is a mosaic of different influences, Western and Eastern and historical, but my hope is that the film shows that young and old and even deceased Mongolians unite in their desire to care for each other. On my part, the film is also my attempt at an act of unification.

LF: During our youth, we often come to understand ourselves through opposing viewpoints and experiences. Ze expresses that he wants an urban, contemporary life, and Maralaa wants a rural life. However, in interacting with each other, both realize that their expressed desires may not be true to who they are. In writing the characters of Ze and Maralaa, how aware did you want them to be of their individual selves?

LPO: I didn’t want to make a film about teenage characters who are too aware of themselves and their desires and futures. What was important for me is that there are different viewpoints and experiences, and that the audience experiences the multiplicity of modern-day Mongolian existence through the film. Ze and Maralaa are both young and have ideas for themselves and their futures, but I wanted these ideas to shift with the film. At the end of City of Wind, both Ze and Maralaa’s futures are uncertain. We don’t know if Ze will graduate with honors and go to university and get a fancy job and buy an apartment. We also don’t know if Maralaa will find a way to move to the countryside and live without herding animals. But I hope that the audience will leave the film with the sense that they have witnessed a shift, a growth in both characters. This is a coming-of-age film, in the sense that Ze and Maralaa are growing right in front of our eyes. A sense of this gentle shift is more important to me than the awareness of clear and certain perspectives and ideas of who they are and what they want.

GF: Ze’s relation to his gift as a shaman evolves over the course of the film. Early on, he is connected quite well to the ancestral spirit, perhaps out of a belief in responsibility to his duty. Then he can’t find it, and later he’s able to re-establish the relationship, but with deeper significance. How did you prepare Tergel Bold-Erdene for this process of spiritual growth and development?

LPO: All I could hope to receive from Tergel as an actor is complete sincerity. I didn’t want him to be aware of a grand arc in his character. He’s an amateur actor; it’s his first role. I didn’t think he would respond well to much intellectualizing. I just needed him to be sincere in his emotions in all the scenes. The idea of spiritual growth and development had to come from the film, not from his “acting.” When I first met Tergel, I knew very quickly that he would be suitable for Ze because I found out that, unlike a lot of young men his age whom I met for casting, Tergel had access to his emotions. This is something quite unusual in men, especially Mongolian men, young and old. I had him recite a children’s poem three times. Before each recitation, we had discussions about love, tragedy, and anger. First of all, he didn’t flee from talking about his emotions. And secondly, each recitation of the poem was colored by his emotions. After talking about a tragedy in his family, he was sobbing as he recited this poem about a little lamb. I caught him at a very delicate time. He was still kind of a child when I cast him, 17-18 years old. He had a delicacy and an innocence which were quickly disappearing because, at this age, he and his peers are facing the adult world. I got very lucky with Tergel because he was hanging on to his innocence.

LF: One of the most interesting elements of your film is the role that parents may or may not play in the lives of their children. Ze’s parents set up a household that quietly encourages their children to explore and define their own path: they’re supportive of Ze’s sister as she faces single motherhood, and they allow Ze to decide on his own whether or not he wants to go to university or work after high school. Interestingly, Maralaa’s mother is mostly hands-off in her parenting style too, but unlike Ze’s parents, Maralaa’s mom is rarely around, and her father is in Korea. In both Ze’s and Maralaa’s cases, both end up finding out what they really want in this world with little explicit guidance from their parents. Could you talk about how you approached developing Ze’s and Maralaa’s family dynamics in relation to their individual experiences? How important was it that neither protagonists’ parents were forceful in their parenting?

LPO: It’s so nice that these thoughts came across in the film! While writing the screenplay, it was very difficult to navigate the relationships with parents because the script “required” the parents to be antagonistic forces. There was a bit of this generational conflict that was written and filmed, but ultimately none of it entered the final cut. These “conflicts” with the parents were too dramatic and too forced. They didn’t suit the universe of the film and what I wanted to say with it. City of Wind is interested in tension, not drama. What I ended up showing in the film is the tension of parents facing the fact that their children are growing and knowing themselves. So, the scenes that were left in the film are basically parents who sit, look, face, observe, and are present as their children transform and shift in different ways around them — like Ze’s parents drinking tea together, sitting with the fact that Oyu is gone, and Maralaa’s mother and Maralaa facing each other as women in the corridor. Ultimately parents can’t do anything. It’s a fact of life that children will grow. It was a decision on my part to not dramatize this fact and instead try to capture a bit of this tension.

GF: To give us a better context to the education that Ze has in the film, we’re curious as to what kind of school he attends? For Westerners, it has the appearance of a private academy, but we sense that may not be the case. How typical is the rigidness and discipline of Ze’s school?

LPO: The school is public. Uniforms are mandatory in public schools. For me, the discipline in Ze’s school is symbolic of the oppressive relationship that Mongolian youth have with their future. The future is presented as rigid and limited for Mongolian youth. The concepts of success and happiness are connected to material things like apartments and cars. The “Mongolian dream” is basically an apartment in the center of Ulaanbaatar city. Coming from a culture of nomads who roam the endless steppes freely, this is tragic for me. In the film, I wanted the youth to break away from this rigidity with an act that is joyful and anarchic. The spirit of youthful companionship and revolt was important for me to express.

LF: Ze’s teacher is one of the only adults who projects a vision of what Ze should become, and her vision is of him being a CEO, which would pull him far away from his gift and responsibilities as a shaman. As you wrote the character of the teacher, how aware is she of Ze’s role as a shaman in his community? Is she representative of a contemporary Mongolian educational system that pushes students to extremely urban lives, thus abandoning any semblance of rural existence and moving away from their own cultural and spiritual history?

LPO: Yes, she is representative of how the educational system and the modern “Mongolian dream” push Mongolian youth to strive for urban lifestyles and to abandon nomadic traditions. I wrote her to be one end on the spectrum of things that Ze needs to be aware of on a daily basis. He is a shaman on one hand, but also a modern Mongolian youth on the other. And at any point in the day, he is somewhere on this spectrum, sometimes more as a shaman and sometimes more as a teenager. But, he is always these two things at the same time. The film wants to portray him and Mongolian life as a mosaic of moments that range from traditional to modern: Ze’s existence is all these things at the same time, just differing in texture.◼

Featured photo courtesy of Aurora Films.

https://www.aurorafilms.fr

RADU JUDE

Originally published on Ink 19 on November 2, 2023

Interview conducted by Lily and Generoso on October 26, 2023

Part satire, part documentary, part picaresque inverted road movie, part discursive essay, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World collides historical and contemporary ideas and forces into a kaleidoscopic montage of Romanian society cracking up from the unwieldy pressures of capitalism. The film’s title (borrowed from poet Stanisław Jerzy Lec) and its sobering thesis are undoubtedly serious, but Radu Jude weaves a current of absurdity and humor throughout Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World to assemble a spectacle that fascinates, disturbs, and informs as it underscores the contradictions and complexities of living and surviving in the grave economic state of Romania today.

Jude presents two Angelas to us in his film: the titular female taxi driver from Lucian Bratu’s 1981 film, Angela Moves On, a work of neorealism from the Ceaușescu era, and the Angela of his own work, a current day production assistant driving within and across Bucharest to support her company’s latest project — a worker safety video for an Austrian furniture manufacturer. On the surface, the footage of the Angela from Bratu’s film may seem nostalgic for a simpler time in comparison to Jude’s overworked and increasingly hopeless Angela, but in his decision to slow down key points from Bratu’s film, Jude reveals the truths of reality and representation under Nicolae Ceaușescu and provides an understanding of how they influence the state of the present-day in which his Angela must operate. Ceaușescu’s reign still haunts the nation and serves as a point in time that many have collectively worked to depart far away from, but the new rulers are multinational corporations that take advantage of the lower cost of living and the shorter history of democracy in Romania and thus bring no relief to issues of exploitation, oppression, and poverty during the time of Angela Moves On.

The dual Angelas is only one key dialectical example in Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World. Jude’s film is completely and unapologetically composed of a multitude of contrasts: his Angela lives in our highly polarized times, and her reactions to her boss, her interactions with and descriptions of the injured factory employees she interviews for the worker safety video, her intellectual interests, and her rants as her digital foil Bóbita — a caricature of social media vulgarism at its finest (or lowest depending on your perspective) — are all products of the opposing ideas and beliefs unrelentingly surrounding her. While Angela’s experiences emerge from concerns and problems specifically in Romania, her reflections, frustrations, and motivations resonate with all of us who are trying to navigate societies pulled apart by capitalism of the 2020s where we spend more time working, with little to no promise of job stability and with any hope for the end to the grind getting pushed further beyond the boundaries of possibility.

In our lively and introspective conversation with Radu Jude, we discuss his interest in juxtapositions in his approach to cinema, the expectations of capitalism on image-making, the importance of creating a filmaic architecture, and his desire to encourage reflection before we embrace further change.

• •

GF: This week, Film at Lincoln Center showed the new restoration of Jacques Rivette’s L’Amour Fou, which is one of our favorite films of all time. Though the film centers on Racine’s Andromaque, a classical tragedy, L’Amour Fou possesses a modern energy carried by its two leads, Jean-Pierre Kalfon and Bulle Ogier, interacting with each other, their artistic circle, and the material of Andromaque itself. We watched your press conference at Locarno, and you referenced Rivette’s quote: “Cinema is not storytelling only; it is instead a descriptive essay, an art of juxtapositions and making connections.” In a sense, was Lucian Bratu’s film Angela Moves On your Andromaque as the central focus of juxtaposition?

RJ: Oh, that’s a very interesting and flattering comparison — I’ve never thought of that! Actually, to be completely honest, and I know that this is really shameful, Rivette is a recent discovery for me. Immediately after I finished shooting this film, I accidentally saw one or two films by Rivette, and I became instantly hooked, so I proceeded to see all of his films in the following two months, and I even read the book of his writings, Textes critiques. Then, all of a sudden, Rivette became very important to me in a way that no other director has been for me in the last few years. In fact, I’ll be at the Viennale to give a talk, and the only ticket that I insisted on was for L’Amour Fou because the only version that I was able to watch in the past was from a bad VHS bootleg transfer.

To get back to your question: One of the main ideas in L’Amour Fou is the juxtaposition of this contemporary story with the theater play, and now that you mention it, you are getting a degraded version (laughs) of that with my film, since I am not Rivette, and Bratu is not Racine, of course, but I think there is a common root. Rivette and I both love the idea of montage and Eisenstein and this idea of the juxtaposition of things, which can lead to the creation of new ideas, sensations, feelings, or points of entry.

So maybe, in this way, our films can meet at this idea of the montage. Storytelling in cinema usually means to simply have events or narration that advances and advances and advances, but there is also another way that is less used, which is more similar to a collage or more similar to literature of digressions or more similar even to this idea of montage in a philosophical sense of the clash of elements that creates something new that’s difficult to define. This was the idea for the whole film because it is made with elements that work with and against each other in a certain way or one after another, but not necessarily in a very logical way, but not completely illogical either, so it’s a bit in between.

LF: Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World is composed of masks and distortions and disillusionment. The most salient of them is, of course, Bóbita, but we see Angela morph in distinct ways in her reality that feels like different masks too: On the phone with her boss, we see an outraged and frustrated Angela when she’s on the phone with him and when she ultimately submits to his demands. We see a sympathetic, but also distant Angela when she interviews the different factory workers. We see a professional and deeply intellectual Angela when she’s driving Doris Goethe from the airport to her hotel. As you were creating Angela, how did you want to ground her in the midst of all of these masks? How much of her shape-shifting is driven by survival as compared to her own desires?

RJ: This is a complicated question. There is something here that is related to fiction films, but it is also possible to discuss it for documentaries in some cases, and that is: what is a character, and how do you define a character? Here you have many possible answers, starting with the classical example from dramaturgy and also from screenwriting, which creates the idea that a character’s role is just to perform or to exist in such a way as to advance the plot, so a character then becomes simply a pawn for the storytelling. Or, you could go in the other direction, like David Mamet, who says that characters do not exist — that in the beginning you have some words on a page, if it’s either a script or a play, and then you have an actor performing it, so there really is no character. For me, I’m somewhere in between these concepts.

Robert Bresson has a very interesting phrase in his book, Notes on the Cinematographer, where he states that the model, which is how he referred to his non-professional actors, should not play themselves, but he or she should not play a character either; in fact, he or she should play no one. I have this feeling that if we have to define the character as you say, it is a mix or a meeting between the body and the being of Ilinca Manolache, the actress. There is a lot of documentary within this character. It is herself in many ways — in more ways than one. Then, of course, it is something related to myself and to people who I have met, and there is something to the meeting of all of these elements in such a way that you can ask yourself if this character is believable as a real person or not. I think that the character is believable, but what I find a bit boring in the dramaturgy of cinema, and also in theater on many occasions, is that you have to define a character in a few lines and stick with it.

I recently saw Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, and in every scene, DiCaprio speaks a bit like he’s an idiot, and he plays that very well, a bit worryingly well (laughs), but for my taste, I would have liked a moment where his character is not a complete idiot because I believe that we all have contradictions, and I am very attracted to contradictions. This is why I try to build Angela’s character in a traditional way of speaking where she can quote Proust or Faulkner and be an intellectual, but, for most of the time, she has a bullshit job. She can also be aggressive; she can be angry; she can be pragmatic, and I believe that even if a character exactly like this cannot exist in real life — but then again, who knows — I think that it remains true in a broader sense that we all contain contradictions. No one has only one, two, or three dimensions. I think that people are more complex than that, and not only complex, but also they have things that contrast with one another.

GF: You also stated in that Locarno press conference about your desire for your actors to contribute to their characters’ construction. In terms of the script, did you employ something similar to what Mike Leigh does, where he hands his actors small notes on what the scene should be about and allows them to create dialogue and react to the environment? Or were much of the dialogues and scenarios written and provided in advance? Particularly, we’re thinking about the scene where Angela is eating the massive burrito, and she gives money to a homeless man, who is then shooed away by the restaurant owner. Ilinca Manolache’s response to the owner feels unscripted.

RJ: So, firstly, I think that Mike Leigh does have a method like you describe, but I think it’s even more demanding on the actors than that; I believe he gathers his cast, then they develop the story and their characters themselves. That is Leigh’s process, and I think that’s unique, but it may have been adopted by other filmmakers.

I am not sure that I would be able to do that because I need a bit of distance to create the story or to even think about the story. Also, it depends on the type of actors that you have for your film. I don’t know about British actors, but Romanian actors, regardless of whether they are good or not very good, are not, in my humble opinion, particularly strong in improvisation. I don’t know the reason for this, perhaps it’s because of their school of acting and training, but whenever I have tried to get my actors to improvise, the results have not been satisfactory for me. I think that even Mike Leigh would have trouble making his kind of film with Romanian actors.

Finally, as far as my method, the kind of improvisation where you give an actor a scene and let them run with it just doesn’t work for me because everything that is part of the mise en scène is very important. So for instance, let’s say I am not only interested in the words that people will convey or try to convey — for me, each word is something in and of itself. For example, if someone says “phone” or “mobile phone,” for me, that difference is important. I cannot just let them say what they want, even if in some way it means the same thing. For me, every word has a special meaning, an important meaning, and I am interested in this meaning within the mise en scène, but of course, at the same time, I enjoy the contradiction that I’ve spoken about. I like the accidents that might create the scene, and so in the scene that you mentioned, with Angela and the beggar, that was staged, but we shot it in a real location with real people around, and we put the camera in a hidden place so that when surrounding actions took place, it became a mix because the way people reacted was real, since they didn’t know that we were shooting. So, I like to set up for these kinds of accidents or to rely on hazardous things, but only if I can create the kind of structure to allow these things to happen.

GF: The way you describe your approach, it reminded me of something from a conversation I had with the director Lodge Kerrigan about a film that he directed called, Keane, which we greatly admire. There are scenes in that film that took place in the Port Authority Bus Terminal in NYC, which can be an intense place. I asked him what it was like to shoot there and he explained that they rehearsed on location and shot that scene with the people who happened to be there that day in the background who were reacting naturally to the actor’s actions. I feel that style of filming added so much to that work.

RJ: I have seen Keane, this film with the man who is searching all over New York City for his lost child. It is a very strong film. That manner of shooting is effective, but it depends on the situation. Whenever you try to stabilize a film, there’s a balance you need to find: if you try to control it too much, you can suffocate it, but if you let it loose too much, you can disintegrate it too. It is difficult to know the proper dosage.

LF: In relation to that balance, you always feel chaos in the frame or lurking on the edges throughout Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World. But, the driving scenes of both Angelas add a stabilizing pulse to the film while also sharpening the insanity of the surrounding world because it creeps into their vehicles and is heavy on both when they leave their cars. During editing, how conscious were you in building a certain rhythm/structure with the driving scenes?

RJ: I think the film is very structured. It has a broad structure, which is very logical for me. You have the first part where you follow every step of this woman driving and doing her job in a regular workday, which is intercut with images from Lucian Bratu’s film and also with her avatar video creations. Then you have a second part, which is the next day when you see the results of her job, where the focus is on another character, so she then becomes a minor character.

To try to express how much of this is controlled and how much is chaos, it is exactly like the question of how much is fiction and how much is documentary. Because, of course, it is a fiction film, and with that, there is a lot of staging and scripted dialogue, but because we shot in the real traffic of Bucharest, that gives the film a documentary quality and a documentary sense of timing, so to speak.

You know, at some point, I thought that my film was the opposite of Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis because, in his film, you have a rich man who lives his whole life in a limousine, and in my film, you have a working class woman who strives to stay afloat, and her job forces her to live in her car, and her car becomes somewhat like the car in Cosmopolis, but in another way becomes an extension of herself. It somewhat becomes her house and her being. You see it in a realistic way, but you can also see it as a kind of metaphor about this new condition of human beings in capitalist modernity where new technology gives us different degrees of freedom, yet at the same time, it is enslaving you.

It is also an anti-road movie, especially in terms of American cinema from the 60s to the 90s in films like Easy Rider and Thelma and Louise, where the car is seen as the epitome of freedom! You hop into your car and put your “pedal to the metal,” and you race to find your freedom, but I find that in Romania, and especially here in Bucharest, which is so crowded and polluted, a car becomes a trap, and it cannot be a metaphor for freedom anymore.

LF: Yes, we lived in Los Angeles for a few years and there a car becomes not even your home, but almost a coffin.

GF: As we watched the car scenes, Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten and Jafar Panahi’s Taxi immediately came to mind. Like Angela Moves On, both of these films were created under heavy political censorship and yet reveal truths. What is the nature of censorship in the images of contemporary Angela and the factory employees? Is today’s censorship of a capitalist kind in non-totalitarian societies?

RJ: I am afraid that the question is too general for me because, when we speak of censorship, we usually mean the ugliest versions of it, like political or economic censorship. At the same time, there are things in film and really every work of art that are of an illicit nature, which I think is fine for the most part, but I would never say that a snuff film falls under the freedom of expression. For films like that, there should be censorship. So, I do believe that when we talk about censorship, we must consider what kind of censorship and in what context, and this is why I have some difficulty answering in a broad manner. I think of political correctness in the same way. I find some of the ideas normal and even good, and in other cases, I find them idiotic. With that said, if you ask me if I am for political correctness, I will respond, “I don’t know,” because I think that we have to discuss specific issues in detail one by one.

In my film, when a corporation or a private person pays for something, they want something in return. There is then this clash because we all have this belief that art has to show the truth, but when a corporation or commercial entity then dictates what the image needs to say, that creates a conflict. I’m sure that Western societies have been dealing with this kind of issue for forever, but this is something quite new in Romania. The dictatorship had a very strong and clear kind of censorship that was very brutal most of the time, but they could also be fooled on occasion, or there could also be some kind of negotiation. But now, you also have this form of economic censorship or boycotting censorship towards some product, which is an entirely different kind, and it’s quite new.

If you think of my film, it is kind of amazing that there aren’t that many Romanian films that deal with this relationship between individuals and the new gig economy, the new capitalist economy, and the new society because not many of us know how to deal with such issues.

LF: I agree that censorship is a very charged word because it prompts debate about rights to expression, and this new nature of economic censorship is more like economic requirements that financiers define and expect, and that is old here, but even though it’s old, most people still do not know how to deal with it because it is a very complex issue. And, few here have captured these economic expectations as acutely as you have.

RJ: Maybe it’s also because of what Godard used to say that people don’t like to watch people working and work problems as topics for film (laughs).

LF: And your film offers no answers. It explores all of it, and audiences, especially in the United States, want answers and the quick solution to a problem. But in today’s world, it is often unclear what we are supposed to do.

RJ: Yes, but there’s no answer because there’s no question. My purpose with this film was very modest. Getting back to the Rivette quote from earlier in this conversation, cinema has the capacity to describe, in a very broad way, but also in a very complex way with a certain language and with situations, so I tried to describe the lives of some people who are caught between personal relationships and economic relationships in a city, in a community, and in a country with this new economy. So, when people tell me that I don’t offer solutions, I respond by saying that I was simply trying to describe something.

I’ve also been asked a few times, “Does your film change something? Is the film changing people or society?” I paused a bit and thought about how to respond, and I realized that all media tries to change people. A commercial tries to change you by making you want a Pepsi instead of a Coca-Cola. A commercial for a political candidate tries to get you to vote for someone and not for another. I then thought that if my film tries anything, it tries to get people not to change or, at least, to wait a few minutes and reflect on things before changing opinions. I am happy because my films are not trying to change the world; on the contrary, they are trying to get you not to change because things are changing too rapidly.

GF: We felt the same way about your film as we did the third part of Miguel Gomes’ Arabian Nights, “The Enchanted One,” where he shows the bird trappers who are trying to teach the birds songs for a competition. He brilliantly gives you the first two parts where he shows the effects of a world that is rapidly changing, and then by showing these trappers, he shows a community where people can slow everything back down.

GF: You were recently quoted as saying that your “films are becoming more and more amateurish.” We love the urgency in what you’re doing now, but we also love your earlier films Aferim! and Scarred Hearts, which were more formalist in nature. Do you see such formalism as out of place given the pace of change in the world and the state of filmmaking in general?

RJ: There is a mix here. It is mostly due to some personal inclinations, with a certain number of years that have passed over me, but also with the fact that with the cinema of today — and here I can only speak more towards European cinema because I am closer to it than to American cinema — is more and more standardized from many points of view. From storytelling to technical aspects, all points of view in the filmmaking process are more standardized to make what is called “official cinema.” There are all of these workshops these days where you go with a project and you meet experts — experts who tell you to cut your film in a certain way. Then, you go to a lab like Sundance, and they tell you something else that you can do, which can be a good thing, and I’m not against those things per se, but I get the impression now that the wilder things are being cut out in order to make a very rounded work. And so, perhaps because I am fed up with this, little by little, I started to develop a taste for making trashy or unfinished things, which, of course, is not something very new. I think that there was always a kind of tension or dialectic between these kinds of elements.

Look at the 1960s, for example. You still had these great Hollywood films, and at the same time, you had Warhol’s films. You also already saw a strong rise of independent cinema like Cassavetes, and then you also had the films of Jonas Mekas. In the 1970s, you had films like The Godfather, Star Wars, and Apocalypse Now, but you also had these small diary films from the avant-garde.

So, I am more and more interested in learning from underground cinema, and I have always felt that there were dialogues between all of these people who seem to support only one type of cinema and who we falsely assume don’t want to see any other type of cinema. I recently read that David Fincher’s Seven had credits inspired by the films of Stan Brakhage. Of course, you can criticize Fincher for that because he takes these very strong aesthetics and uses them for these credits, but to me, it is evidence that there is always a dialogue between types of cinema. And you can see the alternative in a Warhol film where he incorporated Hollywood themes, like how he utilized the idea of a “superstar.”

I am interested in trying to find myself or to be myself with my work, making a dialogue between the history of cinema, literature, and internet cinema, like TikTok videos, and trying to not see them through their specificity, not be judgmental of them, and trying to see that they are all part of the same kingdom of cinema, so to speak.

LF: As you describe this, I am oddly reminded of a quote from Alain Robbe-Grillet in his essays on the new novel: “There would be a present world and a real world; the first would be the only visible one, the second the only important one. The novelist’s role would be that of an intercessor: by a fake description of visible things — themselves entirely futile — he would evoke the “reality” hidden behind.”

RJ: I have not read Alain Robbe-Grillet’s writings yet, but that is beautiful. It is like the quote, “Cinema tries to film the invisible.”

LF: As a filmmaker, in your current shift away from the structures of your films like Aferim! and Scarred Hearts, are you more in pursuit of that kind of invisible in a conscious sense?

RJ: That is difficult to say, as I don’t know myself that well. I would say something different. In my narrative films, I am interested in two things, which are of course connected. One of them is storytelling, and the other is montage. By storytelling, I mean the structure of the story of the film is extremely important to me. It’s part of the film itself, and I am strongly interested in researching and finding structures that maybe aren’t completely original, but are also not very traditional. Not for the sole reason that I do not want to make a traditional film, but firstly, because I may not able to do it, or I get bored making something traditional — I’m not sure which one — and secondly, I think that the architecture, the structure of the work, is maybe the most important element, which I think is the case more in literature and music than in cinema.

When you read Ulysses by James Joyce or a Faulkner book, the structure of that novel is unique or extremely powerful, not only the story and not only the characters. So, I think that this is what I am most after. I am very fond of John Dos Passos because of his U.S.A. trilogy, which has great narration and storytelling. It has not only political and social elements, but also documentary cuts from newspapers, biographies of politicians, historical characters, and interior monologues. All are put together in these books, and it works! But today, if you made a film like that, it would be labeled as experimental cinema, but I don’t agree, as I feel that that is real storytelling.

LF: Your more recent films contain possibly some transgressive moments in them. With Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, there’s the explicit opening sex scene, and with Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, there are some very base elements in Bóbita’s dialogues and Angela’s sex scene in her car. Aferim! has some intense violence that may be considered as transgressive as well. These elements are aligned with traditional definitions of the transgressive. But, where I see your films emerging as incredibly different and beyond what is usually expected, and perhaps accepted, is this mix of high culture and low culture, with things that are very base and mixed with high philosophy. Do you see that blending that you achieved here as a new kind of transgressive cinema?

RJ: You know I saw this word for the first time, “transgressive,” in Tarantino’s book, Cinema Speculation, where he writes that the most transgressive films were those from Abel Ferrara and Paul Verhoeven. But what does this word really mean, though?

LF: It is connotated with its extremeness of subject, and so quite often, transgressive cinema will touch on topics that are, for lack of a better word, unsavory. Nasty sexual deviation, very intense violence, that I wouldn’t say is necessarily cruel or gratuitous, because it is actually grounded in something ugly and real. It is these extreme elements or topics that dive a little deeper into the id of us as humans.

GF: As far as cinema, the New French Extremity films of the late 90s and 2000s, like Catherine Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell and Gaspar Noé’s I Stand Alone, are good examples of the kind of films that could easily be labeled as transgressive.

RJ: Well, I’m not sure then, because if you think of Gaspar Noé and the Extremity film movement, I wouldn’t see myself as that extreme. I would say that I am not very attracted to this idea, in that I would never attempt to do a violent scene or a hardcore sex scene just to be transgressive. For example, in Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, I was amazed that people were disgusted by the sex scene at the beginning of the film. Perhaps because they expected it to be an auteur or arthouse film.

When I conceived that scene, I said that I wanted to do the most banal sex scene ever — nothing spicy and not transgressive, as you say. I thought that a banal sex scene would better serve that story and the moral problem that was the issue at hand or the issue of hypocrisy. I also wanted the characters to not have a sex life that was spectacular, like in real amateur porn videos where the sex looks so very sad. You know, just a quick fuck on a Friday night! That’s why it surprised me when people commented that the scene was shocking or transgressive. As you said, Generoso, Gaspar Noé, sure, he’s transgressive in his approach, but not me, no.

So, as far as this mix between highbrow and lowbrow, I am interested in it, of course, but I believe that it is not necessarily a transgressive quality; instead, I think that this is the most important facet of the culture since modern times. There is a book entitled High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture by Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik. It is about how Modernist art was inspired by low forms like commercials, journalism, typography, or caricature, and I found that book and the examples in it to be very good in showing that despite the differences between what is considered high and what is considered low, there can still be a mutual influence between these elements. I strongly believe that you cannot put them both on the same level, but in your mind, you can be inspired by James Joyce and a newspaper comic strip or by Bach and a cartoon or a caricature from Charlie Hebdo or The New Yorker or by a Jacques Rivette film itself. ◼

This interview was edited for length and clarity. Featured photo by Silviu Ghetie, courtesy of 4ProofFilm4.

https://heretic.gr/film/do-not-expect-too-much-from-the-end-of-the-world/

SCARLET

Originally published on Ink 19 on June 6, 2023

Scarlet
directed by Pietro Marcello

With the release of Pietro Marcello’s enchanting feature, Scarlet (L’Envol), we see the first cinematic adaptation in over sixty years of Aleksandr Grin’s beloved fairy tale novel, Scarlet Sails. In 1961, legendary director Aleksandr Ptushko, who had for the previous decade plus drawn heavily from his animation origins when he created some of the most fantastical, folklore-based films of post-war Soviet cinema, such as The Stone Flower and Sampo, began a period where he would strip away the visual effects that he had pioneered in favor of greater character development. This change in ethos, combined with the popularity of Grin’s work during Khrushchev’s reign, led to Ptushko’s faithful (albeit more secular) treatment of Scarlet Sails.

At their core, Grin’s novel and the film by Ptushko are the equally divided stories of two young people whose actions are heavily influenced by their relationships with their fathers, who each view artistic endeavors in radically different ways. Asole is the daughter of Longren, a compassionate but destitute seaman who possesses an almost supernatural ability to transform wood into art and who has returned home from a long voyage only to find that his wife has perished under foul circumstances, and Arthur Grey, a boy of great wealth, is the son of Lionel Grey, a brutish and cruel man who collects art to further his status as a man of means. Growing up in the small village where she and her father are pariahs, Asole takes joy in her father’s stories and plays with the handmade toys he makes to create her own reality, while Arthur steals away to his mansion’s library to read books and delve into paintings, where he imagines a world of adventure at sea, away from the grips of his father.

As he did with his 2019 reimagining of Jack London’s 1909 book, Martin Eden, Pietro Marcello, who co-wrote the screenplay with Maud Ameline, Maurizio Braucci, and Geneviève Brisac, freely adapts Grin’s novel to the screen in Scarlet. As achieved in Martin Eden, Marcello significantly shifts the shape and depth of the source material’s original subjects, and with these shifts, he creatively skews time and genre and rejuvenates fairy tale and folklore structures with infusions of modernity, which altogether present a transcendent film experience. Furthermore, to diverge from Ptushko’s lavishly shot and epically staged adaptation of Scarlet Sails, Marcello and cinematographer Marco Graziaplena filmed Scarlet in 16mm with a 4:3 frame that imbues the narrative with an intimacy that upholds the warmth between characters while never diminishing the film’s quixotic elements.

Set in the years after World War One, Scarlet centers on the father-daughter pair Raphaël (Raphaël Thiéry) and Juliette. Craftsman Raphaël returns home after combat and finds out that his beloved wife Marie has died, and consequently, his daughter Juliette (Suzanne Marquis, the first of three actresses to play the role in Scarlet along with Asia Bréchat and Juliette Jouan) is being raised by a widow named Madame Adeline (Noémie Lvovsky), who offers the father and daughter a permanent home on her farm in exchange for Raphaël’s help around the property. As opposed to the nameless caretaker she was depicted as (and limited to) in solely the first few pages of the Grin novel, Madame Adeline remains an integral part of Raphaël and Juliette’s life and emerges as a surrogate parent to Juliette and a great friend to Raphaël. With her praise of Raphaël and influence at a shipbuilding worksite, Madame Adeline helps Raphaël get an audition and eventually a job as a woodworker for ship construction, allowing him to settle into a new life and integrate into the community in the surrounding village. However, despite being well-liked, Raphaël still senses a distance between himself and the rest of the village and suspects Madame Adeline’s refusal to greet or even acknowledge local bar and community gathering space owner Fernand could explain why. One day, when Raphaël insistently asks for the reason behind her iciness, she shares the harsh details of Fernand’s nefarious actions that precipitated Marie’s death. Soon after, when a serendipitous moment allows Raphaël to exact a measure of revenge, he, along with Adeline and Juliette, become ostracized from the village, leaving Raphaël with no other option for income than to sell his handmade toys in a nearby city and Juliette as the subject of constant ridicule by her peers.

Accepting her fate, Juliette comfortably spends time alone at a nearby creek, first to release a rescued frog and then to play with a sailboat. There she meets a clairvoyant woman (Yolande Moreau) who predicts that one day she will leave home in a ship adorned with red sails. But when the news of this prophecy reaches the village children, it becomes added ammunition for Juliette’s derision. Though the children treat Juliette with extraordinary cruelty, Raphaël, who appears throughout Scarlet as a Prometheus-like figure, wondrously dissolves the predominance of Juliette’s outsider dread by playing songs on his concertina, telling stories, and building beautiful toys in addition to encouraging his daughter to pursue her own talents such as playing a piano that he restored by hand just for her. With such a creative and nourishing environment, Juliette transforms into a strong and imaginative individual who dreams of freedom at a young age, and when her intelligence is recognized at school, she is given the option of studying in the city, far away from her father, but she refuses to leave him. Over the years, as she remains by his side, she develops further into a virtuous renaissance woman, painting and composing music in a humble studio adjoined to Raphaël’s home workshop. Subsequently, midway through the film when the soothsayer’s prophecy partially unfolds in the form of the dashingly handsome pilot Jean (Louis Garrel), whose grounded aircraft requires a blacksmith’s attention to repair a broken engine part, Juliette, for the first time, has someone outside of her home to share affection with, but after their moment together, she rejects any notion that could lead her away from the place and the people who have shaped her.

Though ultimately still set in an era almost a century ago, Scarlet includes many scripted transformations of the original source text and incorporates multiple cinematic techniques to successfully evolve Grin’s story for a contemporary audience, but the most significant changes made by Marcello and his crew are character-based. Marcello expands the unidentified woman who takes care of Asole in the absence of Longren and his wife from a minor character to a major one in the development of Madame Adeline as a critical supporter and pillar of strength for both Raphaël and Juliette. In contrast to the establishment and amplification of Adeline’s character, Marcello de-emphasizes the novel’s Arthur Grey character, who is adapted into Jean. In one regard, Jean retains the wide-eyed genuine soul inherent in Arthur that would make him appealing to Juliette, but Marcello eliminates a prolonged backstory and adds a somewhat hapless exterior to him, and in turn, he becomes a way to vie against a storybook rescue by a Prince Charming. Furthermore, by wildly experimenting with elements of musical and magical realism alongside hypnotic images of nature in the countryside and woods around Madame Adeline’s farm, Scarlet simultaneously places us into Juliette’s mindset throughout, which also keeps us from falling into the outdated trappings of the traditional fairytale.

With Scarlet, Pietro Marcello revitalizes the classical narrative of Scarlet Sails by drawing us closer and closer to Juliette. Whereas Ptushko’s adaptation inherently distances the audience from its characters with its grand scale, Marcello tightens our focus on Juliette and invites us to live alongside her as she navigates her harsh reality, flourishes with Raphaël’s love, support, and artistry, and expresses her own fortitude inspired by that of her father and Madame Adeline. With such intimacy, we experience, rather than witness, the magical and the real of Juliette’s life, and as they weave together and converge into a single plane, we find ourselves in a fresh, invigorating space that summons inspirations from folklore into new possibilities for our imaginations today.

Scarlet opens at Film at Lincoln Center and the IFC Center in NYC this Friday, June 9, 2023. Featured photo courtesy of Kino Lorber.

https://kinolorber.com/film/scarlet

Ashley McKenzie

Originally published on Ink 19 on May 2, 2023
Interview conducted by Lily and Generoso on April 17, 2023

Queens of the Qing Dynasty opens in a stark hospital room in Unama’ki Cape Breton with nurses moving decisively around Star (Sarah Walker) a young woman who has recently ingested poison and is urged to drink an unnamed antidote from a straw placed in a dark brown bottle. She looks around with wide, slightly glazed eyes that appear to be simultaneously absorbing all of the encircling stimuli while also peering beyond into an imperceivable, alternate world. As we watch Star watch everything moving around her in this clinical setting and then respond in unexpected ways, we are propelled into an empirical mindset that director Ashley McKenzie sets forth and nourishes throughout her latest film.

Soon after, Star meets An (Ziyin Zheng), a student from Shanghai and a hospital volunteer who has been charged with keeping her company and watching over her during her hospital stay. In their first encounter, the two conduct a variety of litmus tests of conversation and expression to understand each other. An pretends to be a housewife preparing dinner. Star pretends to be the husband, and she abruptly ends the kitchen fantasy by picking up the main ingredient, a zucchini still raw, and taking a bite out of it. The two proceed to a chapel in the hospital, and time slows down as they probe and discover each other’s beliefs and perspectives, bringing their distinctive energies in phase.

The duo continues to align as An shares their fascinations with the Qing Dynasty’s concubines and private aspirations, and Star shares her past traumas and keen reactions to An and her environment. And, when An gifts a phone to Star, their understanding of each other flourishes, and they communicate their observations, hopes, and desires openly across multiple forms — text, video, and voicemail in addition to in-person conversation — and grant us, the audience, the ability to take in both of their ways of being through their varying methods of external expression.

Furthermore, in between their interactions with one another, McKenzie presents An’s and Star’s individual interactions with others: An with their friends in a nail salon as they discuss the differences between China and Canada; Star in an inpatient psychiatric hospital; An with their lover. These separate conversations and experiences deepen our understanding of both An and Star — why they have an affinity for each other and what could potentially lead to distance between them — without any explanatory dialog or structure, reinforcing the methodology of the film where words and actions are not used to explain internal states, but rather as manifestations of the changes and persistence of truths in Star’s and An’s existences as they relate to each other and as they progress in their lives.

With Queens of the Qing Dynasty, McKenzie invites us to study An and Star as individuals and as close friends. As we sift through the artifacts and observations they provide us in their behaviors and communication, we arrive at portraits of two unique and vital people vibrating with honesty and clarity, emerging from their surroundings and our current time. We had the privilege of speaking with Ashley McKenzie about her approach to writing Star’s and An’s characters and worldviews, the role of Unama’ki Cape Breton in providing cultural and historical context, representations of mental illness in cinema, and themes such as the complex relationship between technology and society that are emerging in her work.

• •

LF: After watching Queens of the Qing Dynasty, we were thinking about Mark Rappaport’s film, From the Journals of Jean Seberg, specifically, the analysis of Robert Rossen’s Lilith from 1964 where Jean Seberg portrays an institutionalized woman with a caretaker played by Warren Beatty. In Rappaport’s analysis, he brings up how film has often connected women’s mental illness with sexuality, be it a source of madness or a form of madness in and of itself. You make it very clear through Star’s own admission that she’s asexual. We feel that this could possibly be a response to cinema’s recurring portrayal of women’s mental illness and its relation to sexuality. Can you discuss your decision-making process surrounding Star’s declaration of asexuality?

AM: Maybe I’ll start back at the early stages of developing this idea — at that time, I was thinking about the representation of mental illness, specifically in women, in art. I wasn’t really focusing specifically on sexuality then, but the story of Star sort of emerged as part of a portrait series that I was beginning to develop that was looking at women that society may view as having an affliction of some kind. I wanted to write portraits that showed that these so-called afflictions could actually be seen as advantageous qualities. This was a guiding conceptual idea in the early stages of writing, and eventually, in developing these portraits, Star’s character began to materialize more and more, and when An’s character was introduced into the script, it became so large that it grew into its own film.

As I developed the piece on its own, I had this feeling that Star’s character is a very queer one in every sense of the word. I genuinely feel that she defies all of the normative expectations that the world puts on her, so that was something that I realized about her at a certain point, but not until after I had kind of written her character. When I stepped back, I had this moment when I was reading queer theory and noticed that much of it was reflected in Star. So, I was aware that all of that was happening, but I still had not consciously decided to make Star an asexual character — that was something that arose organically or subconsciously in the writing, but I think it does feed into those bigger ideas in queer theory in many ways. Much of my writing comes together in an organic way, so it’s hard to know the exact origins of some of the ideas. But, in post and in releasing the film, that aspect of Star’s asexuality has become more apparent to me, and as I read Angela Chen’s book on asexuality, I realized that I too was on the asexual spectrum. A lot of the things that were in the film became clearer to me after I made it, and in the end, some of the elements in my film were very intentional and some were subconsciously implanted.

LF: That makes sense because one of the things that I love about your film is that it has its own energy, and that energy feels very now, and I think that nowness comes from these organic and structured portrait elements that combine together very nicely and feel incredibly present.

AM: It’s interesting because I watched a trailer for Lilith this morning because I have not seen the film, but it reminds me so much of Splendor in the Grass, which was a film I really loved when I was growing up along with many of the other films from the 1950s and 1960s about repressed sexuality such as Nicholas Ray’s films. These films really spoke to me, but when I was watching the trailer for Lilith, it felt so different than now in terms of the dramaturgy. The inner-turmoil of those characters is so wrought, and I didn’t want Star to feel that way. I didn’t want it to seem like she is tormented on the inside because, to me, she actually seems like she is very clear in her intentions and has a lot of self-knowledge and composure. I think that most of what is out of sync for her is the relation between herself and the pressures that structures and institutions are placing on her. That is where I see the tension existing, and it feels even clearer this morning after watching the Lilith trailer and noticing how much of that film’s energy comes from angst.

GF: While your film is undoubtedly a contemporary one, it also has its own independent sense of time, but its title and An’s fascination with concubines is anchored in a very specific period of Chinese history. Did the fact that the Qing dynasty was the last imperial dynasty of China influence the film in any way?

AM: I think that the biggest influence was Empress Dowager Cixi, and it is more so her in that time period rather than any historical features of the Qing dynasty itself that left a big mark on the film, particularly on An’s character. She is this icon and symbolic figure. There is this matrix of other icons in the film like Marilyn Monroe, but for An, Empress Dowager represents someone who can find their self-power in a system that is not built for them to necessarily access power, and she’s able to do so without sacrificing her femininity. And perhaps, if you get into the history of it, that is not entirely true of her character, but just the idea of concubines that are able to end up in this position of power, or as An says in the film, “being able to expand your empire while keeping your nails long,” represents the possibility of strategizing how to attain some self-power without having to compromise femininity. This speaks to them a lot and Ziyin Zheng, who plays the role of An and who helped develop the character as a script consultant. For Ziyin, growing up watching television melodramas and soap operas about the Royal Palace and concubines was something very meaningful to their development and worldview and shaped the women whom they looked up to. So, An’s fascination with the concubines was coming from a very personal place for them.

I like the idea of how that could become a guiding star for each character and how they are able to see the world differently by looking at these Empresses at that time. I think the other distinctive thing about Empress Dowager Cixi — and maybe this does speak to the Qing Dynasty being the last imperial dynasty — is that she did break tradition a bit. She had a more open relationship with Western culture. She was the first member of royalty to have her portrait done, and she had an American painter [Katharine A. Carl] do her portrait. She also had connections to Theodore Roosevelt, so upon reflection, you can see how all of these details about her connection between East and West would make sense for An’s character and their own journey and the things that they are trying to seek in life.

LF: I did read a bit about how the Qing Dynasty was notably an era of change. The concubine system was simplified. There was unprecedented connectivity between East and West. And, eventually, at the Dynasty’s end, the Republic of China emerged. It does feel like the historic changes of the period inspire An’s character in a subconscious way, and perhaps are in the undercurrents of when Star and An first meet and go to a chapel in the hospital?

In that space, they explore conceptions of each other through ideas of good and evil. Star asserts that she thought An was evil. An sings of angels. And, the image of Christ watches them as they learn about each other. It’s a striking scene because we have the opportunity to see both characters trying to understand each other’s motivations and codes of ethics in a space dedicated to Christian faith, which has its own independent system of action, motivation, and judgment. Could you talk about how this chapel scene was conceived?

AM: More broadly, the chapel scene — before I get into the Christian worldview aspect of it — is, to me, a pivotal moment for the two characters where they are trying to understand how the other person communicates, learns, or expresses themselves, and that takes a bit of trial and error. It’s like rehearsing — seeing do you respond to this or that? I find it so interesting to see them engage in that way and then arrive at an effective model of care. Throughout the film, you watch Star engage with more institutionalized care, and that usually doesn’t arrive at anything effective, but that little bit of extra time and experimentation that it takes to try to meaningfully forge a connection with someone and achieve some attunement was what that chapel scene was all about. To me, that is where the essence of where care or connection can begin, so the chapel scene is part of an experimental process where I could allow them the space to explore each other’s responses back and forth.

Then, in terms of Christianity, I was coming at it from this place where Star has this very particular worldview, and An is able to recognize that and tries to understand it from their own perspective by bringing Celine Dion into the mix as their own sense of worship, which is directed more towards a diva or an empress or a concubine. I was trying to play with those two contrasting perspectives a bit, while also somewhat blowing up Christianity’s influences on both. The way that we conceptualize Star’s backstory is that she did have a Christian worldview that was imposed on her at home with her foster parent, and as thus, she has learned to process things through that narrative, but you can see how it breaks down in the scene. She knows that she does not really fit into this Christian framework, and as she processes An and other stimuli in her environment, she notices they also don’t fit into any part of it either, so the scene is also trying to chip into that structure and expose the flaws in it. Furthermore, at a certain point in the edit, I was thinking about conversion therapy and homophobia, and I thought that this film needs to do the opposite and try and workout and purge internalized homophobia and work towards a queering of everything, relationships and orientations, and converting in a reversed way.

LF: That idea of Christianity’s role as point of departure then re-envisioning is interesting. It makes me think back to Star’s bedroom in the inpatient hospital and the cross that is painted over with wall paint, but is still very much present over her bed.

AM: All of the small town hospitals are kind of like that here. Most of the small towns are Catholic, so when all of these buildings were constructed, it was during a time when religion was very entrenched in all aspects of life, and there hasn’t been a redesign since then. These buildings are generally just running their course, but there are still these remnants of that past era.

GF: The chapel scene does an excellent job in establishing that Star and An both have their own logic that the people, communities, and structures around them don’t understand. And yet, they understand each other, and we as the audience understand them too. Simultaneously, through the interactions that Star and An each have with others, we also come to understand the logic systems outside of theirs (Star’s social worker, An’s friends, An’s lover, Star’s guardian), and all of these different logics cohabitate in the space of Queens without any one becoming too dominant in influencing how we as the audience should interpret the film. How did you approach balancing all of these different ways of operating?

AM: A big part of my filmmaking process is tied to how much I am influenced by the people around me, so there is a lot of real life that makes its way into my films. I can often think back to a person or two or three that I may have in mind at some point when I am developing a character. I think that there is something about having a real life connection to draw on that hopefully pushes me to want to achieve a humanizing portrait. In a broad way, my approach to films is so linked to real life that I want to empathize and understand all of the characters and do them justice in their portrayals. How I try balancing all of that is by putting care and understanding into all stages of the process: from writing to shooting to editing and then getting lots of feedback and taking a long time to do everything and overthinking everything and getting perspectives that are different from my own and trying to be very critical about all of it myself while also knowing that nothing that I have just taken in will give me a very clear answer [laughs] and yet still going down that road of wanting to understand it all in order to represent something that feels honest in the end.

With Queens, I had a clear intention to build a deeper characterization in the writing stage. I very much wanted to focus on dimensionality with everyone, but specifically Star and An. It was my mission to develop those two characters and construct portraits and sculpt them in a way that they are complex and nuanced, so they have different sides, and you cannot easily pin them down.

Sometimes, I felt that in my past work, and in many films that I really love, that there is a certain pure, minimalist, distilled style that emerges in independent/arthouse films where the characters can become a bit elusive, and they don’t say much. In doing so, they can feel as though they are more sophisticated because they are giving you so little, and they are so mysterious, but I felt that I didn’t want to hide behind that convention. In previous interviews, I discussed this idea of an ellipsis. There is an author who brought up that the word “ellipsis” means something that hides behind silence, and I was feeling that in Werewolf and my past films that I was using ellipses in a way that, in developing this film, for me to use an ellipsis in certain scenes and moments felt like I was trying to hide behind something. So, I wanted to give these characters more space to say things and listen to what they say and try to respond to what they are giving me.

I was taking a risk in that things could have gotten messy, and they might have felt uncomfortable, and maybe things from a dramaturgy perspective were going to become awkward, but I believed that I needed to take that risk to arrive at something more honest and richer altogether.

LF: Those risks paid off well. Star and An are such singular characters who feel real because of how they express the complexity and conflicts in themselves and their situations. This is particularly clear when we hear about An’s reflections on Canadian society. We often understand a society by its treatment of its most vulnerable. Though the society in Unama’ki Cape Breton isn’t able to help Star get to a place where she can be independent, it is at least able to provide resources to her to keep her somewhat afloat. In the scene in the nail salon, An says that the Canadian government is “too generous,” and this is a prickly statement because this sentiment could form a stark division between them, as someone trying to leave an oppressive and desperate situation in China to become a new Canadian, and Star as someone who was born and raised in Canada. This assertion about the generosity of the Canadian government doesn’t prevent An from getting closer to Star, but this also is not an idea that they express to her, despite their openness with each other. How much of An’s (and also Ziyin Zheng’s) assessments of Canadian society, good and bad, as an immigrant do you feel plays a role in how An perceives Star?

AM: Because the film plays out in a condensed time period, I don’t think that it reaches that point in Star and An’s relationship where they may have to face more of the prickly realities that you are bringing up. I think the biggest difference that they would have to reckon with is the class separation between them. In some ways, it creates a magnetism between them, but I also think that it could bring about a certain degree of judgment. I do feel that, in the latter half of the film, there is a boundary that emerges as An gains more insight into what Star’s life is shaping up to become and recognizes that they have different visions for themselves.

What An first perceives in Star and is attracted to is her apparent freedom, which comes from her severe marginalization in society where she has been deemed as useless in a capitalist structure, which in turn positions her in this place where she has nothing to lose because she is seen as having nothing of value to contribute. Because An sees Star taking risks, they are attracted to that because they are afraid of taking certain risks as they are an economic immigrant coming from an oppressive place in many ways and seeking paths to better wellness, spiritually and in their mind and body, while also looking for a culture that is more affirming to them. As an economic immigrant, An has to be more careful about what they do because they could very easily be sent out of the country and not secure their residency. In addition, as an economic immigrant, they have connections to a family that may be supporting them financially, and they don’t want to do anything that could jeopardize those ties either.

That class difference between the two of them is the crux of what I believe is feeding into how An perceives Star. They really want to spend time with her. They really love how she can be free, but that gets tempered by class realities. Perhaps they can come to a more nuanced place and probably will by their experiences knowing Star, but I don’t think that they’re ready to sacrifice their position in society to couple in any kind of normative way.

GF: As we close our conversation, we want to discuss the distinctive roles that technology and mechanization play in your debut feature, Werewolf, and in Queens of the Qing Dynasty. In Werewolf, there are two distinctive machines that come to mind: the methadone distribution machine and the ice cream machine. We oddly recalled both during the scene in which Star is given an exercise to evaluate if she is fit to live in a group home and has to use a diagnostic tool that abstractly sets the boundaries of monitoring a stove, but is devoid of any explicit connection to a specific task in a realistic setting.

Altogether, these devices raised to us a theme in your films where technology and machinery accomplish tasks that easily can be handled by humans, but for a variety of reasons cannot or do not anymore. In Queens, this is most apparent in the phone An gifts to Star. The duo should be able to open a channel of communication without the phone, but it galvanizes the creation of the lifeline between them. This is an intriguing, nuanced perspective on technology, society, and humanity. Is this perspective something that you’re mindful of when you’re making your films? How does Unama’ki Cape Breton as your home and your setting influence this?

AM: This question gets into some things that I do see arising in my films, and I feel that I am exploring and using film techniques to try to work out this perspective. I believe that it is fundamentally important to contextualize these ideas in this place. For any symbol or motif, I like the idea that things don’t have to have a dominant meaning or that their meaning could shift based on context. This is something that often comes up in my work because I’m making films in an environment that is very specific to an island, and consequently, everything becomes so shaped by the place in a more pronounced way. So, when I think about using technology or different visual motifs in my films, I try to cast objects in a similar way that I cast performers and scout locations. Objects can be this other vehicle of expression, but, within the particular context of my daily life and the worlds being built in my films, an object’s certain symbolic meaning can shift.

Therefore, when I think about the phone in Queens and how An and Star could open up a channel of communication without the phone, I believe that’s true to some degree. But, in this context of being on an island where geography can be a quite a large barrier for some people if they don’t have access to transportation, having alternative modes of communication can be a critical lifeline, and that was something that fueled the writing of this film based on my personal experiences of how a phone could make a huge difference in people’s lives when they are many layers removed from physical connections. I also think that it’s interesting that people can reveal themselves and express themselves in different ways depending on what mode of communication they are using.

Also, I’m a big Jacques Tati fan, and he comes to mind when I think about technology and machinery. The portraits that he did about living in a mechanized society remind me that it is always more than just good or bad. I so greatly admire the way he approaches these issues complexly and comedically. That was always something that was going through my head as I was making Queens.

Another reference point that is admittedly not a unique correlation is field transference, which is a concept I’ve always loved. You know how in François Truffaut’s book on Hitchcock he describes how objects are exchanged as guilt transference in Hitchcock’s films? And, you see how Claude Chabrol does guilt transference with objects in his work as well? This is an idea that I have internalized, so, for me, if a character is going to exchange an object, they are going to be transferring more than just the object itself because they’ll subliminally package some other things into the mix. That said, the phone doesn’t quite operate as a guilt transference in this context, but I do think there is something more than what is on the surface because of that notion.

Queens of the Qing Dynasty opens at the Metrograph in New York City Friday, May 5, 2023.

Featured photo of Ashley McKenzie by Calvin Thomas.

Queens of the Qing Dynasty

Smoking Causes Coughing

Originally published on Ink 19 on March 27, 2023

Smoking Causes Coughing
directed by Quentin Dupieux

This past year saw two exceptional comedic features directed by the absurdist talents of French auteur Quentin Dupieux. The first of the two Dupieux films was perhaps the director’s most lovely, yet no less surrealistic effort of his career, Incredible But True. In that film, Dupieux cast the star of so many of his previous efforts, Alain Chabat, as a middle-aged man (also named Alain) who strives to own a country home where he and his wife Marie can spend the latter part of their lives together. A modest goal indeed, but as expected in a Dupieux film, Alain and Marie’s newly purchased home also possesses a time-shifting basement portal that allows its subjects to travel forward in time by a half-day, while reversing their age by three days in the process.

This otherwise miraculous facet of what should be a quaint retirement chalet for this aging pair carries little interest for Alain, for he is comfortable in his own skin and only longs for a good day of fishing by the creek and evenings dining and chatting with his wife. Unfortunately, the appeal of regained youth fervently compels Marie to plunge herself through the magical gate again and again, leaving Alain as the concerned and bewildered husband of a woman who is vainly and haphazardly hurling herself back towards her teenage years as she tries to avoid her own mortality.

With Smoking Causes Coughing, Chabat is again placed as the grounded center of a Dupieux film where he portrays a character who is comfortable in his own skin, but, this time, that skin is the gray pelt of a hedonistic, woman-chasing, and green slime drooling rat named Didier who doles out the assignments to the Tobacco Force, a squad of superhero-clad kaiju fighters knighted with the names and powers of the most deadly of ingredients found in an average lung rocket: Mercury (Jean-Pascal Zadi), Ammonia (Oulaya Amamra), Methanol (Vincent Lacoste), Benzene (Gilles Lellouche), and Nicotine (Anaïs Demoustier).

When we are first exposed to the Tobacco Force, the team is in action, laying waste to a human-sized Gamera clone called the Tortusse with streams of their powerful cancer-causing agents dispensed Ultraman-style to our nuclear reptile. After an absurd battle, the deluge of carcinogens takes its toll on the monster, who in turn bathes our heroes in its viscera. Now, with evil foiled, a vacationing family that has witnessed the carnage from afar requests a cheery photo with our wholesome combatants, who gleefully oblige before heading off to interface with Chief Didier to receive their next assignment: a much-needed team retreat to a cabin in the woods, but with the archetypal cabin here replaced by a sterile, modernist fortress/bunker instead.

As in Incredible But True, natural surroundings provide the launching pad from where our protagonists can access their true selves in Smoking Causes Coughing. On the first night of their retreat, our squeaky clean quintet partakes in the camping tradition of telling scary stories by the fire and, in doing so, have a chance to indulge in the contemporary need for real-life violence (albeit, here, abundantly surrealistic) as a form of entertainment. This familiar setting breaks down the facade of the team and reveals who they are to each other and themselves beyond the confines of their ’60s-kaiju-battle-inspired uniforms.

After coaxing the other members of the Tobacco Force to allow him to take the campfire stage, Benzene tells the first of the comically horrific stories in Smoking Causes Coughing. He regales his teammates with the tale of an innocuous couples weekend that takes a bloody turn when a vintage “thinking” helmet is found that allows its wearer to finally have lucid thoughts — ones that allow the wearer to see her husband and friends as the pointless bores they really are, and thus, unworthy of another breath. Next, a freshly caught barracuda, in the midst of being grilled, shares the story of a wood chipper accident where the victim, who is reduced to just a pair of talking lips floating in a gelatinous pool of his remaining fluids and flesh, is fairly unbothered by his newly transformed state.

As each story plays out, we see through the response from the Tobacco Force that the apathy towards the extremes that encompass the world of the film’s era — one which by all accounts could be set somewhere between the ’60s and today — is clearly entrenched in our psyche. In fact, our numbness to everything here on Earth is further underscored when a somewhat domesticated Ming the Merciless figure named Lézardin, Emperor of Evil (Benoît Poelvoorde, from Dupieux’s 2019 film, Keep an Eye Out), seeks to destroy our planet because it’s not that appealing anymore, and the mighty Tobacco Force can do little to stop their galactic foe.

Through the execution of this fantastical setup, Dupieux has again creatively and entertainingly reduced our day-to-day existence to what it has become for most: an endless buffet of pointless narratives and vices that distract us from the inevitable forces of our reality. So whether you’re the Tobacco Force fighting ambiguously evil monsters or the rat form of Alain Chabat in Smoking Causes Coughing, who needs a constant flux of libidinous escapades as a form of affirmation, or even the loving husband form of Alain Chabat in Incredible But True, who is satisfied with enjoying the small moments of life, at least you’re doing something, as opposed to most of us, who have grown accustomed to sitting in our boxes and simply watching while we wait for some proverbial end.

http://www.magnetreleasing.com/smokingcausescoughing/

Feature photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing

Lily and Generoso Fierro

THE CONFORMIST

Originally published on Ink 19 on December 22, 2022

The Conformist
directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

Though Bernardo Bertolucci was only 27 years old when he, along with Dario Argento and Sergio Leone, co-wrote the story for Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (C’era una volta il West) in 1968, by that time, Bertolucci had already amassed a decade of experience in filmmaking. Beginning his career as a teen as an assistant director to Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bertolucci was only 22 years old when he directed his first feature, La commare secca, a brutal murder mystery based on a short story by Pasolini. Subsequently, Bertolucci would write and direct Before the Revolution (Prima della rivoluzione) and Partner while working on the story for Once Upon a Time in the West, a film that, in many ways, was the model perfect storm for what he would create two years later with The Conformist.

Leone’s epic western was a remarkable blending of both young and veteran talents into an urgent and timeless entry into the genre. Shot by the masterful eye of Tonino Delli Colli, who would go on to lens multiple films for Pasolini including Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma) and The Decameron, Once Upon a Time in the West starred the legendary Hollywood actor Henry Fonda playing against type as a villainous mercenary named Frank, the well-established tough guy Charles Bronson as the mysterious and taciturn Harmonica, and the prolific actress Claudia Cardinale, who was twenty years Fonda’s junior, as Jill McBain. This eclectic combination of gifted artists, which again included story co-author Dario Argento, who was still two years away from directing his impressive first feature, the giallo Bird With a Crystal Plumage (L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo), would add all of the right elements to make Leone’s film the classic that it is now considered.

One would assume that Bertolucci’s experience with the ambitious production of Once Upon a Time in the West helped inform many of his choices when he was creating his 1970 masterpiece, The Conformist, which has recently undergone a superb 4K restoration under the supervision of Fondazione Bernardo Bertolucci before heading back to theaters at the beginning of 2023.

At the center of The Conformist, Bertolucci selected the seasoned Jean-Louis Trintignant, who just a few years earlier had risen to international stardom on the strength of his performances in Claude Lelouch’s romantic drama, A Man and a Woman (Un homme et une femme), and Costa-Gavras’s political thriller, Z. For the role of Giulia, the wife of Trintignant’s antagonist/protagonist Marcello Clerici, Bertolucci cast twenty-three year old actress Stefania Sandrelli, who had starred in his earlier film Partner, three very successful comedies for Pietro Germi, and Antonio Pietrangeli’s I Knew Her Well (Io la conoscevo bene). Behind the camera for The Conformist was a then virtually unknown cinematographer named Vittorio Storaro, who would develop into one of the most celebrated visual artists in cinema history as he went on to shoot Apocalypse Now, Reds, and many of Bertolucci’s later films, including Last Tango in Paris, 1900, and The Last Emperor. And to complete this phenomenal outfit, the film-scoring titan Georges Delerue, who was nearly two decades into his career in cinema and had already created music for the films of Jean Luc-Godard, Alain Resnais, and François Truffaut, composed and conducted the music for The Conformist. Bertolucci harnessed the distinctive talents of the ensemble he put together for all of the elements of The Conformist, and in turn formed a work of cinematic perfection that foreshadows why any concrete definition of societal normalcy continues to elude us today.

In his adaptation of the novel of the same name by Alberto Morovia, Bertolucci blended most of the book’s prologue, which concentrates on the problematic youth of Marcello Clerici, into a few flashbacks inserted within the first third of the film, where we primarily see an adult Marcello who has joined the rising National Fascist Party in Italy as a means of absolution for his youthful transgressions and shame for his dysfunctional, disgraced aristocratic family that have left him with an overwhelming desire to become a normal member of society. To further his efforts of assimilation, Marcello has also become engaged to a seemingly thoughtless bourgeois young woman named Giulia, whom we first see in a striped Armani dress that Storaro blends with the daytime lights emanating between the slats of her living room shades that render her as trivial as wallpaper.

As a framing device for the narrative, we intermittently ride along with Marcello as he struggles with his newfound ethos while driving on snowy roads with his brutish colleague, Manganiello (Gastone Moschin), to consummate his first assignment for the Party — an assignment that originally began as a intelligence mission where Marcello would attempt to be accepted into the academic/political circle of his old professor, Quadri (Enzo Tarascio), who has gone into exile in Paris as an anti-fascist political dissident, but has now turned into a plot to assassinate his former mentor. In order to get closer to Quadri, Marcello uses his honeymoon with Giulia in Paris as an excuse to reacquaint himself with the professor from the glory days of his classical education. Complicating matters for Marcello, however, is his sudden infatuation with Quadri’s wife, Anna (Dominique Sanda), who makes separate attempts to seduce both Marcello and Giulia. Though he is steadfast in his duty for most of the film, Marcello’s experiences with the sexually adventurous Anna create a conundrum within Marcello that forces him to confront issues of his own repressed sexuality that have led him onto the troubled course that he set for himself and can no longer escape without severe repercussions.

Through Storaro’s eye, which incorporates an aggressive use of depths, bizarre shooting angles, and deep, rich colors that build a dreamlike atmosphere, we are constantly pulled away from anything that could be viewed as a traditional character study in The Conformist and into an overarching examination of normalcy as it relates to class imperatives. The ethereal elements of Bertolucci’s film, such as the visual aesthetics and purposefully erratic performances, help strip away a layer of our emotional connection to the characters’ plights to elucidate how socio-economic status primes each character’s level of acceptance of the dysfunction around them. Though both Marcello and Giulia desire some degree of normalcy, the two have radically different understandings of it based on their class, and this is notably visible in how they handle their individual childhood traumas. Giulia grew up as a woman in a sheltered upper middle-class environment during the early 20th Century, so she has little power to enact change, and therefore, she passively accepts the abuse committed against her by a family friend, whereas Marcello, who grew up in an affluent home, possesses the privilege and connections to become an agent of societal action in order to obscure and rewrite his memory of molestation and his personal history of familial instability.

As chilling as it is psychologically complex, after more than 50 years since its release, The Conformist remains as one of the finest achievements of the cinematic medium, not only for its impressive collection of diverse and eventual legendary talents who contributed to its production, but also for its prescient statement on how our socio-economic statuses can misguide our perceptions of reality and create delusional hopes of admittance into a functional society that is most likely non-existent because, in fact, society is as fractured as we are.

The Conformist opens at the Film Forum in NYC on January 6 before expanding to theaters nationally. Featured photo courtesy of Kino Lorber.

The Conformist

Generoso and Lily Fierro

LAURA CITARELLA

Originally published on Ink 19 on November 29, 2022
Interview conducted by Lily and Generoso

It’s been just over a decade since the premiere of director Laura Citarella’s feature Ostende, the film that first suggested the character of Laura, who appears at the center of her newest feature, Trenque Lauquen. During the time since Ostende, Citarella has enjoyed great success as an integral part of the famed filmmaking collective El Pampero Cine, a major force within the New Argentine Cinema movement. In 2015, Citarella, along with Verónica Llinás, co-directed the critically acclaimed naturalist feature Dog Lady (La Mujer de los Perros), and Citarella followed up that directorial effort with the release of Mariano Llinás’s 808-minute, six part masterwork, La Flor (The Flower), one of our top ten films of the 2010s, which she acted in and produced over a ten-year period. And in 2019, she co-directed the documentary Las Poetas Visitan a Juana Bignozzi with Mercedes Halfon.

Presented into two parts, Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen transforms Ostende’s passive lead character of Laura (Laura Paredes) into a determined botanist who has vanished from the titular town where she had originally been sent to complete a scholarly plant cataloging assignment. Part one begins with the introduction of the two men who are trying to track down Laura: her boyfriend from Buenos Aires and university colleague, Rafael (Rafael Spregelburd), and Ezequiel (Ezequiel Pierri), a hapless municipal driver who has become infatuated with Laura after they shared a passion for the old letters sent between two lovers (Carmen, a teacher in Trenque Lauquen, and Paolo, the father of two of her students) that Laura serendipitously found tucked into the pages of books in Trenque Lauquen’s library donated by the estate of Martín Fierro, the eponymous protagonist of the epic poem by the Argentine writer José Hernández.

Part two of Citarella’s film expands into the history of Laura’s involvement with Trenque Lauquen’s doctor, Elisa (La Flor’s Elisa Carricajo), who has asked Laura for a sample of a yellow flower. This seemingly normal botanical solicitation leads to an event where Laura uncovers Elisa and her partner Romina’s (Verónica Llinás) vocation of protecting the half-human, half-amphibian child that exists in the town’s lake, compelling Elisa and Romina to ask Laura for her assistance in cultivating plants for a habitat that can support the child’s development. Laura complies, and when Elisa, Romina, and the child must leave their home, Laura assumes a greater role in their collaborative efforts while finally and fully connecting to the world around her.

A nominee for the Horizons Award for Best Film at this year’s Venice Film Festival, we adored this emotionally complex and engrossing feature when we saw it at AFI Fest 2022, where we picked it as one of our top watches. In our discussion with Citarella, we spoke about Trenque Lauquen’s connection to José Hernández’s Martín Fierro, the evolution of the character of Laura, the shortcomings of Rafael’s and Ezequiel’s theories, and Citarella’s love of Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds,” and her use of it as her protagonist’s ringtone in both Ostende and Trenque Lauquen.

• •

GF: The name Martín Fierro is a galvanizing clue for Laura in Trenque Lauquen. Martín Fierro, of course, is the legendary protagonist from José Hernández’s duet of poems El Gaucho Martín Fierro (1872) and La Vuelta de Martín Fierro (1879). In addition, the poems were written in a distinctively lyrical style that was inspired by payadas. Were Hernández’s poems a launching point for the structure and the musical nature of Trenque Lauquen? And if so, how much of the writing/experiential process of Hernández, who was well known for being a writer who lived alongside gauchos in the pampas, go into the construction of Laura’s character?

LC: As you may know, I am a part of a group of filmmakers called El Pampero Cine, and El Pampero is a wind that blows in the province of Buenos Aires, so we always work with Buenos Aires as an idea for making films, and so this is the pampas! If you go out from the city of Buenos Aires, you have the province of Buenos Aires where there are different cities, and if you go to the west, you will find Trenque Lauquen, and there you will find the pure pampas of the gaucho and everything in the world of Martín Fierro. Working in this atmosphere is a continuance of working in this place, which is very flat, and I believe that most filmmakers are afraid of shooting there because you never know how to frame it because it is a landscape that has no borders, but we love that. We love to find excuses or stories to invent that could take place in this scenery. That said, when we started working there years ago, we decided that this place would give our production company its name, El Pampero Cine. In 2011, I made a film there called Ostende, which is like the first part of Trenque Lauquen because the concept is to move from one town to another with the same character and build stories about each one, but always with the thought of portraying the pampas. We not only like to shoot in the province of Buenos Aires, but we also like being there, which is very strange as this is a province in Argentina that you usually just travel through to get to the next stop. Needless to say, this area also has an important relationship to Argentinian literature.

LF: One of the most entertaining and fascinating motifs connecting Ostende and Trenque Lauquen is the “Suspicious Minds’’ ringtone on Laura’s phone. Though the song itself and how it is played are identical in both films, the character of Laura has a different relation to the song in each. Whereas the character of Laura in Ostende is a bit lost in her life—she’s currently unemployed and living with her mom—the character of Laura in Trenque Lauquen is an accomplished researcher. Under these different circumstances, Ostende’s Laura’s actions are based on her suspicions, whereas Trenque’s Laura’s actions are based on her instincts. Was this evolution of suspicion into instinct something you wanted to be a directional guide to moving the Ostende series forward?

LC: Yes, that ringtone was chosen for this idea, apart from the fact that, back then, “Suspicious Minds” was my own personal ringtone because I have always been a huge Elvis Presley fan! My dad was a big Elvis fan, and every week, we would always watch Elvis movies together, so “Suspicious Minds’’ is a very emotional song for me. I kept that ringtone for Trenque Lauquen because I wanted to give you some clues that the character is the same, but the character in Trenque Lauquen has no past; her past is not Ostende. It is almost like The Simpsons (laughs) in that whenever a new episode comes out, everything starts again. So that was the idea, but I also wanted to confirm that the character was the same, so I chose to do this with different hints, such as the ringtone or the photo of Laura that Rafael shows everyone when he is trying to find her, which is the photo of Laura that we used for Ostende.

Apart from that, when we finished Ostende we wanted to use similar procedures of scene construction, but some years later, in the next film. However, as years go by, you are no longer the same person as a director. In between Ostende and Trenque Lauquen, I made two more films as a director, and then I also produced La Flor and other films for El Pampero Cine, so as a creator, you change, and with that, your point of view changes. So suddenly, this character that was in Ostende that was always watching situations and thinking about them alone is now involved with what is happening with the fiction of the film. In both films, she is a fan of finding fiction in places, but in the case of Ostende, she only keeps this as a mental activity, but in Trenque Lauquen, she puts her body in the situation. Therefore, if I had to say something concrete about this, it’s that I feel that, as a filmmaker, you always make the same film in one way, but you change with the years, and in some ways, I feel that the evolution of this character parallels my experiences and growth as a director. The character used to just watch, but now she is brave enough to be part of the adventure! She once was like the character in Rear Window, whereas now, she is like the main character in Vertigo.

GF: The unreliability of our own individual observations and theories is a recurring concept throughout Trenque Lauquen that impacts the experiences of many of the characters and even us as the viewers by the end of the film. The second part of the film particularly amplifies this when we find out that all of Rafael’s and Ezequiel’s hypotheses around Laura’s disappearance are proven wrong. At what point in the filmmaking or writing process did you decide that this would be the case?

LC: I like this idea, as I usually don’t like to speak directly about feminism and boys and girls, but suddenly I felt that there was an idea there: that the men are always incorrect, and the women are always right (laughs). I liked the concept, just like that of Antonioni’s L’Avventura, of a woman who disappears, and as a result, people begin to look for that woman. In the beginning, when we wrote this script, it was the other way around. It was a linear structure, but then we decided that it was much better to bring in these two men who are like bad amateur detectives. For us, this was the best way to show that this woman has disappeared. We found it more interesting to see Laura’s disappearance through the experiences of these two men, than by just seeing it directly. Also, I made a film before Trenque Lauquen called Las Poetas Visitan a Juana Bignozzi, which was a documentary, and in the structure of that film, we discovered that Juana Bignozzi was a poet who died. We were tasked with trying to reveal her profile with our film, and to accomplish this, we spoke about her and showed all of her objects until the middle of the film, when suddenly we showed a video of the poet herself. Through this process, I learned that it is very affecting to begin learning about a character through the eyes of someone else or through their objects, and that is why I waited until an hour and forty minutes into Trenque Lauquen to show Laura, and suddenly when you see her at that point, she has a mystery about her because you already are aware of the fact that she has disappeared, which makes for a stronger method of telling her story as you are imbibed with a feeling that you already know her destiny. You see her in flashback, but you, as the viewer, know that something will happen because she has vanished. Also, I liked this idea of different people having different points of views and versions of Laura, which puts in your head the idea that Laura isn’t any definitive way. It becomes more possible to surround her and not define her.

LF: In the first part of Trenque, we see Laura leading initiatives — she leads the cataloging research project, and she leads the hunt for the letters between Carmen and Paolo. And, in her leading efforts, she’s quite goal-oriented, and that applies often to her interactions with people. However, by the second part of the film, when she becomes entrenched in Elisa and Romina’s life, she becomes a contributor to their work to covertly raise the possibly amphibious child, and at this point, she becomes more open to experiences and seems warmer overall. How did you strike the balance between these two versions of Laura? It seemed quite precarious, because going too far with either side could have disconnected her from the audience.

LC: In a way, what I wanted was to make a mutant film that changes all of the time. This idea of changing also involves the character of Laura. I wanted her to experience this same synchronistic change in her ways of behaving. I feel that this film comes from a fantasy of mine to have many lives in one lifetime. But, I know this is something that I cannot do as I live in a society where I have a daughter, and the actor who plays Ezequiel in the film is my husband, so I have this order in my life, and that means that this fantasy of having multiple lives would be viewed as crazy by most standards, so I am living this fantasy through the character of Laura, who embodies this idea of being present in your life and being so alive that you can fall into things without even thinking about the ramifications. It is kind of an instinctive way of behaving that starts in a very rational way in Trenque Lauquen with the discovery of the letters which then transforms into this world with the creature and these women and then everything else changes. Also, when Laura gets to know these women and when the creature appears in the lagoon, I think that some kind of fantastical element changes the logic of the characters. It is something that invades the rational world.

I also believe that, at that point, she dares to have this life, and the men surrounding her also get pulled into the adventure. The difference is that they can only go so far. I feel that Laura experiments with something that helps to make her feel alive, and Rafael and Ezequiel are, in a way, also moved by this. For the first time in their lives, when Rafael and Ezequiel turn into these amateur detectives, they feel that they can also take part in an adventure, but until they attempted these roles, they were both boring people. One is an academic, and the other one is a divorced man with two kids and an ex-wife, living in a little town and working for the municipality of Trenque Lauquen. And, suddenly this idea of moving everything and getting into an adventure is something that Laura has produced.

Furthermore, I feel that what draws Laura’s attention to the Kollontai book [where she finds the first letter between Carmen and Paolo] is this note from the editor that expresses this idea that with the collective, the first person, the singular person “I” becomes “we.” So, in a way, this is also what happens when Laura meets the two women because they work as a team, believing that you can live in that situation and that can only happen with a group mentality, which mirrors the way we all work in El Pampero Cine, which is fundamentally a collective.

Ultimately, I believe that men need to find the logic within things, but women just need to be there. Now, I am not saying that all men are a certain way and all women are a certain way, but in the context of this film, I think that Laura finds in these women a way of living that doesn’t require constant language, explanation, or logic, but instead they live in a way that is more instinctive, and that is really what Laura has been searching for her whole life.

GF: Trenque’s strength lies in its ability to transform myth into reality and vice versa, and one of the most interesting places where this occurs is around the yellow flower that precipitates the relationship between Elisa and Laura. We don’t officially know the name of the yellow flower, but it becomes an important narrative and symbolic device for the second part of the film. How did you go about selecting that flower, and what were your motivations behind leaving the exact species name unknown?

LC: This is kind of a Hitchcockian idea: in a specific element, you build a tension and a mysteriousness. The flower is the excuse for Elisa to approach Laura, and the flower is the excuse as to why Laura goes to Elisa. The mystery is there! I mean, why would Elisa be so obsessed with wildflowers? Perhaps this is a MacGuffin, but the flowers move the characters, and you eventually find out that the flowers provide a source of food for the creature. We need to give it flowers, or else it will die, so this was also a way of not speaking so much about the creature, but speaking more about how it survives. We added the flower into the narrative because, if we did not have an external element to join these women, we would have to reveal too much of the mystery behind this being. Laura went to Elisa’s house because of the being, and without the flower, we realized that we would be in a dangerous situation where we would have to show or speak more about it once Laura arrived, and we didn’t want that because we wanted the being to be a mystery in the midst of many other mysteries. We were concerned that one mystery would supersede the others in the film, so the flowers helped us to organize the enigma surrounding the creature without directly showing any part of its form.

This interview was edited for length and clarity. Featured photo courtesy of Laura Citarella.

https://produktion.grandfilm.de

Joana Pimenta

Originally published on Ink 19 on November 25, 2022
Interview conducted by Lily and Generoso

Less than a week after voters selected Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as the next President of Brazil, we had the opportunity to speak with Portuguese-born director Joana Pimenta on the occasion of the AFI Fest screening of Dry Ground Burning (Mato Seco em Chamas), her newest feature, which she co-directed with Adirley Queirós.

We first encountered Pimenta’s immense talents as a storyteller when she lensed Adirley Queirós’s low-budget dystopian science fiction film, Once There Was Brasilia (Era uma Vez Brasília), one of our top ten films of 2018. Set in the struggling district of Ceilândia, Once There Was Brasilia effectively repurposed cinematic tropes as a tool to expand on how the political landscape of its respective period impacted a community that had long suffered since the construction of the city of Brasilia. However, even though it is set in the same district and also incorporates and recontextualizes known film references, Dry Ground Burning diverges from Brasilia in how it integrates documentary to play against genre cinema images, amplifying the dour reality in Ceilândia and adding a fierce urgency to the film’s depiction of the current political situation in Brazil and the programmatic incarceration of its citizens.

Dry Ground Burning follows the exploits of Chitara (Joana Darc Furtado) and Léa (Léa Alves da Silva), life-hardened half-sisters who have tapped into an underground pipeline that provides them with the gasoline that they then sell to bikers in their favela of Sol Nascente, an area in dire need of any form of economic infrastructure. Concurrently, Chitara and Léa’s friend, Andreia (Andreia Vieira), who enters the film as a fellow gasolinheira, shifts into a political role by drawing together her community to support her campaign to become Sol Nascente’s district deputy candidate for the Prison People Party. Throughout Dry Ground Burning, Pimenta and Queirós provide their actors with ample space to engage each other in dialogues that build empathy for their situations, while the actions playing out around them provide us with a clear and biting metaphor of their government’s failed policies that led to the economic despair in their part of the country.

During our hour-long, in-depth conversation with Pimenta, we discussed her approach to Dry Ground Burning in her roles as both a cinematographer and as a co-director, the complex issues connected to the casting of Léa, the construction of the very real campaign of Andreia, the role of the Evangelicals in her film and in Brazil, and the election of Lula, which happened only days before our talk.

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LF: We were fortunate to see Once There Was Brasilia at Locarno in Los Angeles in 2018, and it was one of our favorite films of that year. Whereas Once There Was Brasilia leans heavily on action and visuals for its narrative, much of the weight of Dry Ground Burning is carried on the shoulders of the conversations and interactions of Léa and Chitara. How did this difference shape your approach as a cinematographer?

JP: We wanted to make a film about the daughters of the women who built the city of Ceilândia. If you’ve seen Brasilia and this film, you may know a bit of this story already, but in the 1960s, the President of Brazil at the time decided to build a new capital in the geographic center of the country, so he drew an “X” on the ground in a place that was only just desert before. To facilitate this project, they had to bring in construction workers in open trucks from all over Brazil. Once Brasilia was built, they created this thing called the Campaign for Eradication of Invasions, which is where the “CEI” that is inside the name Ceilândia comes from, and they proceeded to remove everyone who worked on the development to a city 50 km away from Brasilia, which became Ceilândia. After they removed these construction workers, they also removed the women who had been brought to the workers’ city to work as prostitutes because the laborers had not arrived with their families. Many of these women brought small children with them or were pregnant and became single mothers. As a result, because the men were working, they relied on these women to build the shacks and find water and electricity, so these women were the ones who actually built Ceilândia from the ground up. One of these women in Dry Ground Burning is Léa’s mother, and the other is Chitara’s mother, whom we filmed a lot, but unfortunately those scenes didn’t make it into the final cut. And, as discussed in the film, Léa and Chitara both shared the same father, so all four women’s stories are representative of the history of Ceilândia itself.

We knew that we wanted to work with these daughters of the women who had built Ceilândia, this second generation who are also single mothers and who also have an important leadership role in the life of the city. This is where all of the conversation in the film comes from in Dry Ground Burning. These women are not like this new group of women in the city who are in their 20s and are taking over the streets. They have a different kind of body, a different way of dressing, even a different kind of music — they listen to funk, whereas the generation of Léa and Chitara mostly listen to the kind of rap that you hear in the film, and in that way, we thought of Léa and Chitara as these kind of old cowboys who would hang out on the corners in a place where many of the people have been to jail and are unemployed, so they spend their time telling stories.

Thus, the cinematography had to create that space for us because we were not working with a script, and we needed a space for them to mobilize their memories and to be able to depart from the film’s constructed fiction so that they could bring in their own memories and make them the central part of film instead. We were a very small crew of five people, and because of that scale, we had a great deal of time — about eighteen months for this film — which gave us the space to establish the shot and wait for something to happen.

GF: Leá is magnetic — she devours the screen. Since seeing Dry Ground Burning, we’ve been immensely curious about the inspiration behind her performance. How much was her casting based on her own personal experiences and how she recounted them to you and Adirley?

JP: This was complex. We spent six months looking for Chitara. Chitara is a character that we had initially written. We wrote a script, but because we don’t film exact lines, it was more like a structure, a script that functioned for us as a primer so that we could communicate to our actors what kind of film they are getting into. They then knew that it was going to be political, that there was going to be a war, and that made things very clear to them going forward. This communication was super important to us because we were working with non-professional actors.

We had written about this woman who worked at a gas station, who smoked a lot and whose body was so covered and impregnated with gasoline that she was always on the verge of catching fire. This was the archetype for that character, and then it took us about six months to find the actress to play Chitara. We looked everywhere! It must be said that there is no cinema in Ceilândia. In fact, the closest cinema is an hour away, and therefore, there isn’t a tradition for the kind of work we make, and that made it very tough to approach people and convince them to come and have a conversation with us. Eventually, we found Chitara six months after the search began. She was amazing! We read the script together, and she was like, “Well, I smoked a lot. I worked at a gas station, and I know how to shoot a gun, so I’m in!”

At this point, Léa was still in jail for real. She had been in prison for seven years, and because of her behavior, the police kept looking for excuses to keep her inside, leaving us with no idea of when she was getting out. Andreia, who was also in Once There Was Brasilia, and Chitara would always talk about Léa. So, we began shooting and filmed for about eight months, and during that whole time, Chitara and Andreia kept telling stories about Léa, so she became something of a legend while she was still in prison! They would say things like, “Léa is this tall, and her hair is down to her knees, and once she took seven rubber bullets in jail and wouldn’t fall when most men would fall after getting struck with just one bullet.” Chitara and Andreia were constantly building off of their memories about Léa, and that made me and Adirley concerned because she wasn’t a character that was part of the film initially, so we then felt that we had to start searching for an actress to play Léa. But, out of nowhere, the real Léa got out of prison, and only two weeks later she was filming with us!

As you noticed in your question, Léa was even more than anything that we could’ve ever hoped for because she is an amazing natural actress. She just seemed to instinctively understand acting. For example, from the moment that we began filming with her, as soon as one of us would say, “Cut,” she would take off, and we would find her outside smoking or on the corner or on top of the roof. She had been in prison for seven years and didn’t even know what a cellphone was when she got out, but here she was, back in her life, and she was making a film!

In the beginning, Léa may have wanted to work with us because we wrote a twelve month contract with all of the actors, so they all knew that they are going to be paid in a place where it’s hard to find work that can be sustained for a long period of time. But, then, she quickly figured out that she was very good at her job. For instance, when we would tell her that we need to repeat a scene and to do it a certain way, she would respond with, “Oh no, don’t worry. I completely understand because this is the same way that it was in prison. You would have to tell the same story a million times, but every time you tell it, you have to tell it with belief because otherwise the other prisoners would stop listening to you and then you lose your voice of command.”

So, of course, as soon as Léa began working with us, we had to change the tone. We had already filmed for eight months at that point, but we had to make Léa one of the lead characters, and that changed the film into one that was more about her relationship with her half sister. We didn’t have a closed script, and because we had a small crew, we could use our money to buy ourselves some time to film for as long as we possibly could. There was always room to change things so that we could react to things that were happening politically, as well as things that were happening on set.

LF: One of the most striking tone shifts in the film happens when we get to spend an extended amount of time with Andreia as she goes from work to church and to her canvassing and rallies as Sol Nascente’s District Deputy candidate for the Prison People Party. In this section, you and Adirley offer a greatly contrasting trajectory for Andreia. After her time as a gasolinheira, Andreia expands her focus of impact beyond her immediate crew and seeks reform at a community wide level. The gasolinheira life was highly reactive, whereas Andreia’s following chapter is more proactive. Was this contrast something you intended from the beginning, or was it something that came out of editing with Cristina Amaral or Léa’s expanded role in the film?

JP: I think that more than anything, at this point, we were reacting to this idea of incarceration as a public policy. We were filming in a place where 90% of the population had either been to prison or had a direct family member in prison. In fact, everyone in our cast has either spent time in prison or has a mother, father, or son who is incarcerated right now who they usually visit every two weeks. When we started filming, two major things happened: First, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, our former President, went to prison, and at the same time, political campaigning was happening in the streets because of upcoming elections. And so, we got together with Andreia, who was always going to bring politics in a direct way into the film, although we weren’t initially certain on how we were going to make that happen, but as soon as both of these aforementioned events occurred, we decided to make a political party that dealt with incarcerated people because they are the people who live in Sol Nascente, and because we work with non-professional actors, we made everything happen in this very concrete way.

We registered Andreia and the party for the campaign, and we opened up political headquarters on the main street of Sol Nascente. Unfortunately, none of this made it into the final cut because we were filming for eighteen months and most of what we shot didn’t make it into the film, but we did create a real campaign. We went door-to-door, we went canvassing, we created a jingle together, but most of all, we wanted Andreia to get elected for real! Since there were 16,000 prisoners awaiting trial who still had their voting rights and we needed 20,000 votes to get elected, we worked on organizing these inmates to vote, and if we could also get these inmates’ families to vote as well, then we could get Andreia elected for District Deputy.

When we started putting the campaign into motion, Andreia’s election, for her and for us, became a real possibility. This was important because we were living in a place where there is a programmatic incarceration of people who are black, poor, and coming from poor districts, and so, to a certain extent, there is a belief that every prisoner in Brazil is a political prisoner. At a time when all of this attention was directed at Lula being a political prisoner, we wanted to create a clear statement with Andreia’s campaign: if one part of our population is imprisoned systematically, then that part is consistently robbed of their right to vote and in turn are political prisoners too. Thus, our party was going to fight for prisoners’ rights from this standpoint.

The importance of the party’s focus became even clearer when Léa was arrested for a second time. Adirley and I actually went to speak at her trial as character witnesses, and we attempted to convince this judge that Léa has a job and a contract in our film, and although the system makes it sound like prison is an opportunity to retrain these prisoners to re-enter society, we had someone in Léa who already had been re-integrated. We asked the judge, “Wouldn’t this be a case for you to not put her back in jail?” But, the judge told us that Léa’s past had condemned her, and that meant to us that Léa went back to jail based on this public policy of systematically incarcerating people.

GF: Given that we are speaking about Andreia’s role in the film, we must ask: what is faith to her? We wanted to discuss this because the scene in the church is fascinating, as there’s so much at play there: the streets flooding outside, the other attendees in the periphery, Andreia’s countenance. We can sense the surrounding instability and the seeking of hope and redemption all in this sequence, yet there’s a lot that feels left unseen and unexplained. How important was this balance between the seen and unseen in constructing Andreia’s church attendance?

JP: That is a good question, as I feel that so many people react violently to that church scene because they feel that it shouldn’t be part of the film. Sometimes, I feel that many progressive people have difficulty in understanding other people’s religions. We ended up having to fight to keep that scene in the film—every filmmaker who saw the final cut wanted us to remove that moment, but we felt that it was crucial to the film because Andreia, Léa, and Chitara are Evangelicals.

There is an Evangelical church on almost every single corner in Sol Nascente, so we knew that we had to address faith. Also, Lula almost didn’t get elected as President this past week because the Workers Party still refuses to acknowledge the importance of Evangelicals in Brazil. It is almost like the people on the political left don’t even know how to start engaging with the Evangelical communities, so they pretend that they don’t exist. At the same time, I am not defending the Evangelical Church as an institution. I myself am not an Evangelical, and I am completely aware of everything that they do that is problematic, but within the context of this community, they fulfill a super important role.

It is impossible to go to an Evangelical church, especially with people you know, and not get very moved. These are people who are humiliated in their jobs, and they spend three hours a day commuting to Brasilia to do menial work, and so when I received this question about the church scene at a film festival here in the States, I explained that, in the US, many people have the need and means to see therapists or psychoanalysts, and I don’t see that practice as being radically different from going to an Evangelical Church where you give your testimony. All of a sudden, for half an hour, there are up to a hundred people who will stop and listen to you and hear about anything that you have done, and it is all understood by this group of people. Adirley and I discussed this a lot because every time people film at an Evangelical church in Brazil, they film outside and don’t go in, and thus they make the parishioners seem like caricatures. But in a space like Sol Nascente in Brazil, the Evangelicals occupy a very important function, so it was essential that we showed the interiors of the church.

As for the flooding outside, when we made the decision to film inside, we filmed over many days, and one day, it rained a great deal, and because of the poor infrastructure, the rain came cascading down the street, and the scene became almost Biblical. We also made the decision to shoot everything from the pews, and we removed the preacher from the scene because we just wanted to see parishioners singing and communicating. We just found the whole scene so beautiful, watching them sing with such passion and sincerity. It was very moving for us, and so we wanted the church to become more about what it meant to the actors, and less about how the church has been viewed politically. I’m glad that you both found that moment important because it was so very important for us too!

LF: While watching your film, we felt this instinctive link to Antonioni’s Red Desert. The dependence on fuel and chemical refinement is certainly a part of it, but, more importantly, both films express a dystopian future set in a contemporary space. Antonioni hints at the future through the distinctive experimental score by Giovanni Fusco so that you see the present, but imagine the future through sound. What elements in Dry Ground Burning were the most significant to you in establishing this convergence of the future and the now?

JP: Oil, for us, was a mark of the past and of the history we wanted to mobilize. In Brazil, oil is nationalized, and at the end of the Lula government, a law was created that said that 75% of the royalties from oil had to go to culture, education, and health. So, for a little bit, there was almost the promise of a complete revolution in Brazil because the government was injecting so many billions into key areas that needed help. Then, there was a coup that took President Dilma from power, and then the Temer government and the Bolsonaro governments sold off the oil fields to multinational companies for the price of bananas. So, today, Brazil has not retained much of its oil rights after these two administrations. Basically, the oil that is in our film is the opposite of what you are saying — it is the elegiac mark to the past and to what could’ve been.

When we decided to take ownership of the oil and approach it from a popular narrative, we began to think about what it could mean if the oil belonged to the people. In turn, I think that there were two aspects that looked towards the future for us. First is the militia car. We started thinking about surveillance, and we had this image of how the police always operated in the district by only seeing citizens from inside of their vehicle or through cameras, so we came to the conclusion that if you only see people through these methods, then it is impossible for you to see them as anything but monsters. To explore this idea, we asked our friends, who are also members from the Movement Without Land, to portray these militia members in the vehicle. They played the opposite of what they do in their daily lives! For their motivation, we told them to imagine that they have not left this car for the last ten years and that they were lost inside of it while observing the city. Then, this officially became the future forward element for us when we eventually disassembled the car and burned it in the end.

You wouldn’t know this from watching the film, but this car was only one of five that was made in Brazil during the end of the dictatorship. It was supposed to represent the promise of a new Brazilian car manufacturing industry, and now this car has become an icon of the extreme right. We acquired the car from an old man in São Paulo who refused to sell it to our art director because she was a woman, which meant that we had to get a man to buy the car. Thankfully, our metal worker, who is also an actor in the film, picked it up, but the old man made him promise to take good care of it. We did burn it, of course, but because the car was so expensive, we stripped it for the parts first and then burned only the frame.

The second piece of looking forward is the last shot of the film that has Léa riding on the motorcycle with all of the other drivers behind her. The song that plays is a song that Léa used to listen to all the time while we were shooting, but neither Adirley nor I knew what it was. At some point, we gave up on guessing, and we just asked her what she was listening to, and then, we contacted the rapper who wrote the song back in the 1990s, and we got it to use in the film. The reason why that is future-looking for me is because it reveals where the film stands at the end in a more straightforward way.

The film could have ended with Léa going to jail. Then, it wouldn’t have been two-and-a-half hours, and instead, it would’ve been more like an hour and fifty minutes, which would’ve made it easier to distribute. It was also a naturally clear ending because we knew that it would be hard to come back from Léa going to jail again. It’s a tough watch because that became such a major closing point to all of this, but we made a deal with the actors: they were not going to lose. They had to take over the streets and become the queens of the neighborhood! So, when we go to the burning of the car and the end with Léa becoming a legend, parading across the city, we felt that the film points to a possible positive future. I mean, for me, if there is any hope for Brazil, it is in them to an extent because their strength, curiosity, and generosity makes me personally want to carry on and make this kind of work. So, for me, it is these two things that direct the film towards the future.

GF: Early in Dry Ground Burning, when Léa gets her shotgun back from her brother, you evoke motifs of the western genre (i.e. gunslinger getting out of jail and receiving his gun back), and as a result, you show a future that has regressed quite far back into the past. In light of the election on Monday where voters brought Lula back, did you have a sense that, politically, people would be looking to the past in response to Bolsonaro too?

JP: I guess that was the hope. Because there is no movie theater in Ceilândia, we kind of have to work with the actors with references that we can share, which are mostly from the late night films that our actors watched on television, usually westerns, kung fu films and classic Hollywood movies. When they were all growing up, there actually was this single cinema in Ceilândia that had one show a day called Sex Karate! That meant a double feature of a porno film and a kung fu film, and so it was in this kind of cinemagraphic space that we tried to collaborate. Obviously, the western became more useful here in terms of the aesthetics that we were trying to propose in terms of scale. We wanted wide shots to be super wide, and we wanted close-ups to be quite close, so we were thinking about an elasticity of scale that would allow us to work with bodies and landscapes in a way that Adirley and I were interested in while also allowing us to mobilize archetypes and the idea of what constitutes a legend in a way that we can all watch, discuss, and think about together. That is how these references to genre, and particularly westerns, came into the project.

As far as the past, I think that what makes me sad is that we, as the left, have lost this narrative battle. The only person who could win an election from Bolsonaro was Lula, and he barely made it! We haven’t in all these years been able to build and rethink what it means to do politics, and I think this is somewhat similar to what’s going on in the US too. It’s almost like we are barely coming to terms with the ascendants of the right, when they are the ones reinventing narrative, reinventing language, reinventing how you make political campaigns. The motorcycle drivers, truck drivers, and the delivery people are a good example of this. They are a huge force in Brazil, and Bolsonaro cleverly assembled them for his campaign, which means that the far right is still winning the political mobilizations, especially these large groups that constitute the majority beyond the city centers, but we, the left, are still under the impression that a voter in Rio or São Paulo is more important than a voter in Ceilândia when they all count the same! We have not been able to motivate the voters or form a political campaign in places outside of Rio and São Paulo that speaks to people who are Evangelical or who are without a job, and that means we are still shying away from going to the heart of how that could translate into a political form that could serve us all.

That said, the one person who has achieved that in the most brilliant and wonderful way is Lula because he loves people. I think that he has done the right things, such as rebuilding the northeast. So, looking to the past is more of a sign of our failure in progressive politics to rethink who are the people we should be campaigning with or doing things for right now. In Brazil, voting is mandatory, and yet, here we are still campaigning towards the politics of the center when that doesn’t represent the majority of the electorate.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Featured photo courtesy of Grasshopper Film.

Dry Ground Burning

Miryam Charles

Originally published on Ink 19 on November 16, 2022
Interview conducted by Lily and Generoso

There are many aspects of this year’s AFI Fest lineup that warrant special distinction. In the eight years that we have covered the event, the programming team has consistently expanded on their commitment to discovering and showcasing emerging talents, with this year’s selections going far beyond previous iterations in terms of their international outreach. AFI Fest 2022 also curated an astonishing amount of documentary features that applied experimental methods in order to distinctly tell their narratives while simultaneously expanding the genre.

Amongst our favorite features this year at AFI Fest were a trio of innovative documentaries that used a plethora of unorthodox techniques to delve into their subjects and topics: Alain Gomis’s Rewind and Play, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica, and Miryam Charles’s Cette Maison.

Throughout her early career, Miryam Charles, a Canadian-born filmmaker of Haitian descent, has explored a myriad of issues related to trauma and displacement in her short film work, and now, with her compelling debut hybrid-documentary feature, Cette Maison, Charles examines how the tragic death of her cousin Terra, who died in 2008 under mysterious, violent circumstances at the age of fourteen while living in Bridgeport, Connecticut, impacted her and her extended family. Charles’s film is not concerned with any investigation into the causality of Terra’s death and instead opts for an approach that imagines Terra living in an adult state, which plays out in Cette Maison through a formal staging with actors assuming the roles of Terra and her family. These dramaturgic moments are combined with traditional documentary-like footage and over narration that freeze and shift time to add focus and distance to mirror the emotions behind Terra’s death and the Charles family’s concept of home.

We spoke at length with Charles at AFI Fest on the morning of the screening of Cette Maison and discussed how her short films equipped her to tell such a personal story, her philosophy regarding the use of fictive and documentary elements, her approach to recording the film’s over narration, and how Charles’s family’s immigration to Canada from Haiti affected her life and the construction of her film.

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LF: Throughout your short film work, you’ve explored trauma in multiple situations. Given that your cousin’s death occurred when you were a young woman, how important was it for you to explore these outside traumas in your previous works before confronting the loss of your cousin more directly in Cette Maison?

MC: I think that I was actually preparing myself in a way, not consciously, to work on Cette Maison, because, as you said, all of my earlier films do address trauma, and so I think I was creating these films to work up the courage to take on this project and confront the death of my cousin. For years, my family and I were in a bit of denial about what happened, so we tried not to talk about it. But young women were normally at the center of my short films, and they were always trying to overcome trauma and get answers and find the truth, so in creating these works, I was eventually better prepared to make Cette Maison.

GF: Your short films are also highly experimental in nature and consistently blend documentary-like footage with fictional elements. In Cette Maison, you distinctively heighten fictional and nonfictional parts with the black-box theater staging of certain scenes and dialogs. How did you decide which moments would be shot and presented in this staged form?

MC: From the beginning, when I was writing the script, I knew that a scene like the one at the morgue was such a strange and traumatic moment in real life that I decided that I was going to leave that space almost blank and add elements of set design to accentuate the sense of loss we all felt at that time. Also, since I went into this knowing that I wasn’t going to make a traditional documentary, I met with family members to talk about my cousin, her life, and certain memories. When I went to Connecticut to do interviews, I wanted to also film some scenes using my cousin’s mother’s real-life, beautiful garden, but I realized it would be too emotionally difficult, so as a means to protect myself, I made the decision to recreate that garden in the studio to retain that connection to flowers and plants as an homage to my family because they are very much in tune with nature.

LF: Could you talk about your approach and methods for recording and processing the narration? The volume, the cadence, the distance, and the slight distortion add so much additional depth to the images of the film.

MC: I wrote the script, and then I spent a few weeks with the two actresses who narrated the film. We took that time to discuss the text, to which they added elements of themselves, and then we went into the studio together, drank tea, and talked about life in a very calm, loving, and relaxing way. Thanks to this process, the actresses understood from the very beginning that this was a very emotional story, and it all went well. I then did the recording with the two actresses together. The producers had asked me if I wanted to record them separately, but given that we were doing the three voices of the film, I very much wanted to record our voices together.

GF: Some of the most beautiful images of Cette Maison come from your exploration of what returning to Haiti would look like for your cousin had she lived. What was it like to go back to Haiti to try to capture the sense of place through the imagined perspective of your cousin rather than that of your own?

MC: Actually, when I started to work on the film, it was very important for me to go back to Haiti to shoot the film there because I am of Haitian descent, and my cousin never got the chance to return before she passed. It was a very symbolic moment for us to go back there together, but in the end, we didn’t. When we started shooting, it was the beginning of the pandemic, and the situation in Haiti was somewhat difficult, so the insurance company would not insure us to film there. I was very saddened by this, so the producer asked me if I wanted to wait a year and a half to shoot the film, and we decided to wait. Unfortunately, then, there was the situation involving the President of Haiti, and the insurance company again said that they could not insure us, so instead of waiting longer, which I didn’t want to do as I had an emotional need to get this going, we chose to film in St. Lucia and the Dominican Republic. I then altered the script so that when the characters talk about returning home and they look at the map, they are unsure of where they are, which was a way for me to suggest that they weren’t really there at all. This added to the nostalgia of the film because I myself had never been to St. Lucia or the Dominican Republic, so all of the images that I shot were from a distance—just landscapes and not a lot of people. Those images created a feeling of wandering and trying to find a home while knowing that home is not there.

LF: That feeling of not knowing where home is greatly resonated with me and Generoso because of our own familial histories. Your parents departed during the regimes of the Duvaliers in Haiti, but there’s no explicit mention of the political state of Haiti in Cette Maison. Was the impact of the Duvalier family’s government something that subconsciously impacted your family? Did it make you feel more distant from Haiti?

MC: I would say that this exclusion is really coming from what I experienced in my family, and I also have a lot of friends whose families left Haiti during the regimes too and had similar experiences. In my home, my parents wanted to distance themselves from what they fled, and they expressed that through their hopes for us to be integrated into Canada. They really wanted us to be Canadians, and they made sure that we learned French before we learned Creole. That, of course, created some distance between me and the homeland of my parents. I was in my late teens when I finally learned Creole, and, if you know the language, I think that you can hear that in the film because when I narrate in Cette Maison, I do it in a very thick French accent. It always bothered me in a way because, given the history of Haiti and its colonization by France, speaking Creole with a French accent is very difficult and loaded for me. But, I decided not to correct it in the film because this nuance tells the story of displacement and the story of how I learned about my family’s culture at home.

GF: Feeding off of this idea of immigrant upbringing, we wondered about the selection of music in your film. Assimilation for immigrant families is always inconsistent, and each family has their own way to preserve culture from their homelands and to accept outsider culture too. How did your music selections for Cette Maison reflect your family’s approach to assimilation?

MC: Very early in the process, I was telling my cousin’s story, but I was also telling my own story, and I wanted to stay close to home. My parents were classical music lovers, so that’s what we listened to in our home, not the more traditional Haitian music genres such as kompa or zouk. When I met with the film’s composer and he suggested a score that was more Caribbean, I told him that I just didn’t grow up with that kind of music, so we filled the score with classical music as an homage dedicated mostly to my dad instead.

LF: For us, the use of classical music in the film also created its own sort of timespace. Nothing feels dated, but also nothing feels explicitly now either. As a result, the film exists in its own independent timespace that is non-linear and separate from our current reality. Can you talk a bit about the creation of this unique and distinct area?

MC: Cette Maison is a film about memory, trauma, and trying to deconstruct or reconstruct souvenirs, and grief distorts time in this process. When you lose someone, it is difficult to attach that moment to an exact time, even when you know what year it occurred. My cousin’s death happened fourteen years ago, but it feels simultaneously so close and yet so far away. Grief does such strange things with time…

GF: Now that you have created Cette Maison, which is such a personal and emotional story, have you begun thinking about your next project and whether that will be a personal story as well?

MC: Yes, I think that my project will be personal, and it will be a comedy about a Haitian family living in Montreal.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Featured photo by Claudie-Ann Landry.

Cette Maison

Memoria

Originally published on Ink 19 on June 28, 2022

Memoria
directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

To be able to be free, you need to get yourself out of everything. You have to be outside your own experience. You shouldn’t see yourself as a subject or as an object of the experience. You have to be outside. You have to be an observer without the intention of being an observer. You, just aware of the awareness.

In Memoria, the book, we have the privilege of seeing into the nervous system—the multi-dimensional graph of stories, thoughts, places, concepts, histories, research, and images—that constructs the manifestation of Memoria the film. In the closing of an early section titled, “4 April 2017 Talk with Joseph,” the quote above appears, which perfectly articulates how the film itself is structured and how we, as the audience, in viewing it, depart from our own seats in dark theaters, from the psychological space between our reality and the film’s fiction, and arrive at a plane of existence connecting us to each other across time and space and beyond our normal range of perception and cognition.

Though its ability to allow us to transcend our reality and the world of the film itself is profound, Memoria’s core plot can be summarized in a few basic sentences. Jessica is awakened by a thunderous sound. At first, she thinks the sound is coming from outside of her, but soon she realizes it’s emanating from inside of her own head, and she gradually begins to understand it through her many interactions with others.

As a scientist herself (though she’s out of her typical domain here because she’s an orchidologist), Jessica initially takes an active, investigative measure to comprehend the sound. Naturally, given that it is something that only she can hear, she hopes to extract it for herself to review and study on demand. To accomplish the extraction, Jessica meets Hernan (Juan Pablo Urrego), a sound engineer recommended by her brother-in-law, Juan (Daniel Giménez Cacho), and with Hernan, she attempts to replicate the sound as she perceives it. As she struggles to precisely describe what she’s hearing, Hernan compounds different sounds and processing techniques, and she quickly discovers that there may not be a well-defined ontology for the sound, or at least one that can be verbalized. However, Hernan manages to produce something that is quite close, but the near-reproduction doesn’t bring Jessica any closer to the sound’s origins, which may be more subterranean or more primordial than she previously believed.

Thus, as Memoria proceeds, Jessica’s process to understand the sound abandons any formal methodology and instead becomes more instinctive and subconsciously reactive as her interactions with the people and everything around her quietly direct her movements and her experiences. They take her to a park where Hernan shares the marriage of her sound with his own personal music and then to a warehouse where the two shop for fridges to preserve flowers. They point her to Agnes (Jeanne Balibar), an archaeologist studying remains from a construction site who shows Jessica the trepanned, ancient skull of a young girl. They drift her toward a practice room where an ensemble is casually performing in front of a small audience. They lure her to the countryside near Agnes’s excavation site where she meets an older version of Hernan (Elkin Díaz), who may or may not have lived an entirely different life. Jessica observes and listens, but she’s not trying to form any hypothesis, so as she moves from different spaces and interacts with the surrounding living and non-living things, her senses transform into deep awareness and open consciousness, both of which allow her to happen upon the extraterrestrial, otherworldly source of the sound.

We, as the audience, can try to be analytical about Jessica’s experiences as we see them on the screen and attempt to determine the relations between encounters, but the fluid, interconnected soundscapes of Memoria pull us away from such acts and coax us into a state where we can absorb all layers of the film at once without ever feeling the need to cognitively register each individual piece. And, here, in this entrancing, conductive state, we can connect to Jessica and ultimately our own present and past counterparts to distill what is fundamental in all of us: a desire to comprehend the unknown and our strategies to cope when the unknown remains beyond the reach of our senses.

In tandem, Memoria the book and film underscore how cinema is one of our strategies to accept and explore the unknowns of our individual and collective realities. Given that Memoria is Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s first feature film made outside of Thailand, both the book and film transmit Weerasethkul’s learnings, experiences, and reflections of a new, foreign environment. The book forms the foundational, mosaic textile that Weersethakul drapes into the exquisite, hypnotic moving sculpture that is the film, which reverberates with the lights and sounds of history and humanity and pulsates with a freedom of experience and expression, bringing us to a new height of cinematic and human awareness.

https://memoria.film

Lily and Generoso Fierro

LILY & GENEROSO 4EVER!

Author: LILY FIERRO