#locarno ff

[jonjost]

Adeus Santiago de Compostela

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[festivalists]

[festivalists]

Locarno70

Locarno is a dream territory for every cinephile. Not only does the festival have two key competitions revolving around the present and the future, the iconic leopard is always keeping a watchful eye on the past. Yet, the past in cinema is never passé but rather a treasure map, and so we will follow our new Canadian contributor Justine Smith as she reads this map for us...

In 1946, the inaugural Locarno Film Festival was launched at the Grand Hotel with a screening of Giacomo Gentilomo's film O SOLE MIO from that same year. Since its earliest days, Locarno has devoted itself to a risky and political cinema, preferring to highlight new filmmakers from new regions than to reaffirm the status quo. Part of that legacy has been the celebration of filmmakers of the past through their retrospectives, as they have highlighted lost, forgotten, and under-appreciated directors.

For the 2017 edition of the festival, also the 70th anniversary of Locarno, the festival focused its main retrospective programming on French filmmaker Jacques Tourneur curated by Roberto Turigliatto and Rinaldo Censi. As always, the festival similarly paid homage to notable figures in front of and behind the camera, including Jean-Marie Straub, Mathieu Kassovitz, Michel Merkt, and José Luis Alcaine. In celebration of the festival’s 70th year, the organizers also took the opportunity to look back at some of the highlights of the past seventy years – devoting the Histoire(s) du cinéma: Locarno70 sidebar to Locarno’s history of discovering new voices.

As one of Europe’s major film festivals, Locarno stands out by focusing its programming on emerging and political filmmakers. Beyond the grandeur of the Piazza Grande, where Hollywood films and crowd-pleasing auteurs wow audiences, the selection is systematically challenging and boundary-pushing. The way these retrospectives function within the wider confines of the festival’s identity is worth a closer examination. While the Tourneur line-up, which is rich and spans an often overlooked career, needs special attention, perhaps the most interesting retrospective of the 2017 edition of Locarno is the focus on the festival’s own history. Indeed, as one of the three oldest film festivals in Europe, Locarno occupies a unique space to reflect and redefine its signature identity. But how exactly do they do that?

Comprising of eleven films, this profile on the festival’s history crosses over five decades and spans four continents. The selection of just eleven titles, as a means of exploring and reflecting on 70 years seems like an astronomical task, and in doing so, the festival seeks to establish its legacy on its own terms. As Carlo Chatrian, the festival’s Artistic Director, explains in the programme notes, “Locarno has always been a place for breaking with the past or turning the present upside down.” The final selection of Histoire(s) du cinéma: Locarno70 films includes Marco Ferreri and Isidoro M. Ferry's THE LITTLE APARTMENT / EL PISITO (1958), Éric Rohmer's THE SIGN OF LEO / LE SIGNE DU LION (1962), Adolfas Mekas's HALLELUJAH THE HILLS (1963), Raúl Ruiz's THREE SAD TIGERS / TRES TRISTES TIGRES (1968), Chadi Abdel Salam's THE NIGHT OF COUNTING THE YEARS / AL-MOMIA (1969), Villi Hermann's SAN GOTTARDO (1977), Aleksandr Sokurov's THE LONELY VOICE OF MAN / ODINOKIY GOLOS CHELOVEKA (1987), Catherine Breillat's 36 FILLETTE (1988), Michael Haneke's THE SEVENTH CONTINENT / DER SIEBENTE KONTINENT (1989), Todd Haynes' POISON (1991), Alina Marazzi's FOR ONE MORE HOUR WITH YOU / UN'ORA SOLA TI VORREI (2002).

There is something almost teasing about this statement, which feels post-modern in its unfixed view of time and identity. The past and the present do not exist in a fixed reality but are malleable as they shift and change through new perspectives and experiences. This reflection on the past highlights integral moments from film history, like the French New Wave and the rise of American independent cinema. More importantly, though, this selection of films opens up a conversation between past and present, reflecting on the nature of time itself.

For example, in 1969, Raúl Ruiz’s TRES TRISTE TIGRE was in competition at Locarno and won the Pardo d'oro prize. This film was the filmmaker's first feature and examined the underground world of Chile during the 1960s. Groundbreaking during its release, in 1989 Caryn James reflected on this debut, as a retrospective of Ruiz’s work was mounted in New York City, saying, “the film's restless hand-held camera movement and its hemmed-in atmosphere of Santiago's small-time underworld seemed as fresh when it appeared in Latin America as the New Wave had in France a decade before.” Perhaps no title from Locarno70's retrospective has a more interesting conversation with the present, as it is the only film whose director took part in this year’s competition, with THE WANDERING SOAP OPERA / LA TELENOVELA ERRANTE (1990/2017). This should raise eyebrows of those who are aware that Ruiz died in 2011 – in fact, the film was shot all the way back in 1990. It is only recently that Ruiz’s long-time editor and wife, Valeria Sarmiento, assembled the film for its Locarno world premiere.

While it is not unusual that previously unfinished films are released posthumously at major festivals, it is almost unheard of that they should run in major competition, in particular for a festival that prides itself on the showcasing cinema of the future. This decision is iconoclastic and challenging to audiences, and likely the jury as well. While after all the film did not walk away with an award, it garnered well-earned praise. The feature, which is inspired by soap operas, tackles the Chilean identity right at the edge of a transitionary moment – just one year before Pinochet has been ousted from office. The film is broken up into seven days, seven different parts with their own contained narrative (even if some are more theme-driven). Among the best ones are those that poke fun at radical politics, such as one where two activists in a car are shot by two activists, who are shot by two activists, who are shot by two activists, etc. Though generally appealing, THE WANDERING SOAP OPERA would certainly attract a niche audience in that Chilean viewers will walk away with a greater understanding and appreciation of the film’s nuances and allusions that an average viewer with only a basic knowledge of Chilean politics and culture.

Among the other filmmakers who were featured in both the retrospective and this year’s programming is Todd Haynes. He returned to the festival with WONDERSTRUCK (2017), a film that has already earned mixed praises at other festivals, yet his first feature, POISON, was screened to an almost packed house at the newly revamped GranRex and presented by the filmmaker. Todd Haynes’ introduction of his full-length debut articulated how our relationships with films can be transformed by time. Made in 1991, POISON was a tryptic exploration of homosexuality at the height of the AIDS crisis. Inspired by the poetry of Jean Genet, the film examines through three different narratives about a sense of loss within the gay community in the face of violence and disease. The director's reflection on his own debut was centered as much on the experience of loss he now associates with the film, as with the production itself.

Before the screening, Haynes listed the many collaborators who died since the film’s production, including his long-time editor James Lyons. POISON is, in many ways, an angry film addressing the gay community’s culpability in violence against each other, as well as the disastrous implication of AIDS. That rage has not been dispelled in a rewatching of the film, if anything, is heightened by the sheer scope the AIDS crisis has had on young, gay men. Within the scope of a current political climate, where a renewed AIDS crisis has hit areas of the United States such as Indiana, the film has continued and horrified resonance in our modern-day.

Still, not all the Histoire(s) du cinéma picks had such overt connections from the past to the present. In fact, one film felt so out of time that it seems a small miracle it was even made at all. Restored several years ago, THE NIGHT OF COUNTING THE YEARS is considered the greatest Egyptian film of all time but is still rarely screened, so of the many discoveries of this year’s festival, this may be among the brightest. Set in 1881, the film reflects on the true incidents of an isolated Egyptian tribe who have relied for centuries on a cache of Pharaohic mummies to make their fortune. After the death of a family patriarch, members of the tribe become greedy, selling off more than they should, and drawing attention to the authorities.

THE NIGHT OF COUNTING THE YEARS examines the cost of identity, tackling the question of what it means to be Egyptian in the modern world. The film feels infused by the dusty desert air, the characters and their homes coated in the past, their past, that they are willing to sell off to the highest bidder. With bright infusions of color, such as fuchsia flower petals laid upon a gravesite, the film has a mythical atmosphere: one in which the living can return from the dead. Looking towards the past, the lack of canonical power of THE NIGHT OF COUNTING THE YEARS is a reflection on the westernized perspective of great art. Cinema of the Middle East and Africa is often relegated to a second-class status as the values and questions addressing cultures and people unlike the European powers, have been deemed, consciously or not, as less worthy. While the vast majority of Locarno’s retrospective on its history has maintained a Western point of view, the presence of THE NIGHT OF COUNTING THE YEARS justifies apprehensions and questions related to the cinematic canon, which privileges certain voices and points of view over others.

One of the greatest joys of a festival like Locarno is that it is a place not only for discovery but doubt. In my two experiences at the festival, debates over merit are quickly overturned in favor of debate over the politics of cinema. The retrospectives, in particular, can serve as an important measure for current dominant perspective on film history and how we conceive important and new cinema.

If you are a film industry professional, you can watch films from Locarno FF on Festival Scope.

[festivalists]

I as an eye

“Las Palmas” usually evokes associations of sunny beaches and decadent tourists, pretty much like in Johannes Nyholm’s cult short of the same name. Yet with Andreea Pătru as our Canary Islands insider, now we know that this happens to be a wonderful place hosting an exquisite festival, with an Official Competition for shorts that could satisfy even the most demanding taste. So we invite you on a slow journey through the ocean of the self!

It is the second year since Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival restored its international section of short films after a long pause, so such a welcome addition to the Official Competition depicts the current state of this less (re)viewed cinema. The 2017 selection consisted of 16 works coming from a wide diversity of countries, continents, and authors, also displaying a pro-feminist curation by including no less than 50% titles directed and co-directed by women. In terms of genres, styles, and working formats, the approach was a diversified one – fiction, documentary, experimental, and animation, even if the preference inclined towards a contemplative cinema that offers unique perspectives on the world. To me, the most appealing proposals were the short films that went beyond our immediate reality to distillate meaning about ourselves as observing subjects of the world.

One of the possible perspectives or strategies to navigate this selection is through the meditative take of Chris Marker’s SUNLESS / SANS SOLEIL (1983) on the trivialities of daily life and how personal memories affect the perception of history and politics. In this respect, Ico Costa's NYO VWETA NAFTA (2017), shot on 16mm, begins from a personal, almost documentary point of view that is blended into fiction. The director started shooting in Mozambique without a predetermined purpose, searching for a friend called Nafta – an episode that serves as a fictionalized search for a girl in the crowded market of Maputo. This search, giving name of the film, develops into a sharp exploration of society through a bunch of funny and unexpected stories told by young men. Just like Marker depicts Guinea Bissau, Ico Costa shows the contemporary face of another Portuguese colony, Mozambique. Instead of an idealistic view on post-colonialism, Ico Costa lets his characters voice their political views on the world, views that are surprisingly more universal than one expects.

The youth of Inhambane, where part of the shooting takes place, dreams of the capitalist goods. Baobab fruit pickers court girls by promising commodities such as houses, cars, clothes, or pursue amateur singing while others discuss on the lack of freedom of rich people who cannot genuinely drink in an ordinary tavern. Apart from funny moments born out of the discovery of Snake, the cult mobile game and a technology that the West already looks down to, NYO VWETA NAFTA intertwines these shots with a contrasting poetry of the youth's curiosity in the face of modernity. In a memorable scene, one of the characters recites pretentious terms that supposedly relate to the baobab fruits they are picking. The camera pans vertically as if climbing the enormous tree while the boy naively brags how this wonder fruit with superpowers, trendy in the West, would change his life. The contrast between those who collect the raw material and those who exploit the posh market of organic foods is disheartening, yet the boy’s innocence reveals a vibrant image of humanity.

Case in point, an even more distinguishable social commentary is being exemplified in NIGHTFALL (2016), co-directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong and Tulapop Saenjaroen. Again, like Chris Marker, the filmmakers resort to the tool of exchange as a voice-over to accompany the fictionalized images. The cinematography focuses on a nameless woman that crosses impersonal modern spaces versus her aimlessly wandering in luxurious parks. However, she does not gain enough weight to be a protagonist, the camera showing undistinguished people walking pedestrian tunnels that seem to lead nowhere. The vocal exchange plays out between two legendary figures in the Southeast Asian politics, Lee Kuan Yew, the ex-Prime Minister of Singapore (responsible for the country’s miraculous transition from a third-world economy to one of the Four Asian Tigers) and Thanom Kittikachorn, a notorious military dictator of Thailand's past ruling over a military coup. The two share diplomatic cordialities that are in fact empty words, general statements about each other’s politics.

Both politicians praise each other’s historical achievements, like Thailand being the only nation that Western powers could not colonize, or Singapore’s augmented financial growth. Apart from a sculpture of an elephant, symbolic animal of the Siam culture to remind of this political encounter, the image focuses on the extreme contrasts of Singapore today. The directors resort to dream-like imagery, like a door opening to a lush vegetation only to swap to skyscrapers and cable railways overlooking to the modern city landscape. Like in her highly praised feature BY THE TIME IT GETS DARK / DAO KHANONG (2016), Anocha Suwichakornpong uses the historical facts as a means to explore memory, blur the lines between time and space, and confer a subtle social critique. The confrontation with urban spaces is being examined as a part of past decisions' consequence that produces contemporary realities.

Once more, following the SANS SOLEIL first-person heritage, the festival screened some works that highlighted the power of the self in constructing our actuality, like Jacqueline Lentzou’s Berlinale selected HIWA (2017) based on the architecture of remembering. The Greek director, awarded last year in Locarno for FOX / ALEPOU (2016), continues to explore family constructs, yet this time she employs the means of dreaming. In HIWA, a Filipino man called Jay tells his wife as an off voice about a dream he had about their daughters. The dream soon turns into a nightmare set in a fictionalized Athens he had never visited before. The director depicts familiar places in an enigmatic manner, with a floating image that contributes to the feeling of evanescence. Avoiding the postcard scenery of the city, the dad (re)constructs Athens as a venue of suffering and decay, where his daughters are innocent victims without knowing it.

Similar to Konstantina Kotzamani’s depiction of Athens in her 2015 short YELLOW FIEBER, Lentzou renders an exotic apocalyptic setting that has little to do with reality. However, in HIWA the city is a traumatic place due to the personal experience of feeling rootless and lost in a foreign country. To recall the fuzziness of dreams, the short has a grainy image that reminds of found-footage video essays. For Jay, ordinary places like the meat market become the perished hospital, and the girls' turtle-shelled backpacks remind of being trapped under one’s own home. This sensitive story is portrayed with a directorial aesthetics close to documentary, although there are a few artificial reactions from the mother’s side that let slip this feeling. Meaning “wound” in Tagalog, HIWA is indeed the consequence of an open wound, a subconscious father’s worry for his daughters supported by an ambiguous depiction of time and space that are suppressed like in a vacuum. While this psychoanalytical approach reminds of Lucile Hadžihalilović’s transformation of realistic images into an esoteric reflection about our usual surroundings, Jacqueline Lentzou chose the dream-like imagery to depict a fleeting manifestation of trauma.

An interesting addition to the competition, NO'I (2016), directed by Aline Magrez, explores an exotic place like Vietnam, precisely a crowded little street of Hanoi, through surprising links based on the protagonist's personal interaction with the space. The author avoids a Westerner superior perspective about a place she is not familiar with, yet she embraces her condition of a visitor trying to connect, to discover this small community. The film is built around slow-paced travelings along the rails that cut through an impoverished neighborhood. It is a very peculiar space, with the rails almost glued to the damaged improvised houses. At the end of this maze, curling continuously from the outskirts of the city to more inhabited areas, the viewer gets a glimpse of a contrasting cleaner and more modern version of the city. Like with Jacqueline Lentzou, the camera of Aline Magrez focuses on a dream-like sensation set in a single space.

Still, NO'I accomplishes this feeling with a clever editing that connects the city’s wires with the railway lines and imaginary threads which the camera dolly draws through movement. Avoiding dialogue and direct sounds, the ties between the inhabitants of this atypical street are almost impressionistic. The editing is intuitive, associating surprising interior with the routine along the exterior of the houses. Like the people who build their little habits around the passing of the train, the camera organically waits for it to pass and keeps rolling. Appealing even to multiple exposure, NO'I relies on an inner perception of the surroundings. In a scene where the neighborhood’s children express curiosity and look directly into the camera, while the dolly passes by, the camera blends with the landscape like a pulsating vertebrae.

Furthermore, THE I MINE (2017) by Emilio Moreno questions memory through a complex archaeological digging not only in personal experiences, but also in the context of history itself. The short is the closest to a film essay, lending the first-person POV to a biographer, John P. Roquentin, who intends to write a novel about a deaf-blind auctioneer, Valerie Louise Ellis. The director mixes real-life historical characters with his own stance in a multi-layered experience of writing and discovering the personal self. These biographical stories blend with images of digging either in mines or with palaeontologists looking for human relicts in a sort of searching for the narrator’s real self in the past, being it historical or personal. Emilio Moreno’s interest seems to revolve around the idea of language as the mankind’s attempt to define the world. In this respect, the presence of Ellis is almost like a ghostly figure, like a myth, her image being superposed and identified with archival images of the deaf-blind American activist Helen Keller. In some of them, Ellis is depicted caressing the throat of another person, trying to decipher the vibrations of the sounds. The film shows images of Helen Keller with First Lady Grace Coolidge or President Eisenhower, thus fictionalizing her past and attributing her a constructed identity of the auctioneer Valerie Louise Ellis.

This false diary guides the viewer through Roquentin’s own struggle to separate his experience from Valerie’s, while questioning her experience with communication due to her mediated form of knowledge (by touching somebody else’s mouth). We do not know if the inspiration for Roquentin is not the fictional historian with the same name that is the leading character of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea, or an alter-ego of the the director himself as a narrator of somebody else’s experience, neither if the book Ellis wrote is Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life. The similarities are striking, and Emilio Moreno manages to build a faux documentary only to question how identity is shaped. Similar to Chris Marker’s practice, he turns to tracing biographies that are supposed to reveal how history is made.

Moreover, this experimental documentary showcases images taken in a South African archaeological site in contrast with showcasing them in museums. In an attempt to find our ancestors, the past justifies the present. With the help of the auctioneer and images of displayed objects, either contemporary art or palaeolithic exhibits, questions of value arise over our culture and accumulation of knowledge. These objects are not just things to be marketed, yet they carry the value of the stories they contain. It is astounding how through this filtered information and (de)constructed narration dispersing in various interests, the footage becomes auto-referential, questioning how stories themselves are developed. Ultimately, THE I MINE brings to attention a provocative debate in the philosophy of language, wondering if Wittgenstein’s assumption that our words describe reality is true or not. The layers of coding and decoding the spoken language must be different for someone who perceives reality through foreign bodies, as well as for historians who investigate the past through the perception of the other. How can one find his/her own voice and trust history as a gathered experience of others?

Last but not least, the jury gave the award for Best International Short Film to the Canary-born filmmaker David Pantaleón and his THE PAINTED CALF / EL BECERRO PINTADO (2017), a work that has passed before by IFFR. A regular in previous Canary Shorts editions, Pantaleón’s film was the only exponent of the Canary Islands in the Official Competition. The short uses the biblical imagery of the Golden Calf that Moses’ brother Aaron built for the people of Israel while they gave up waiting for their leader to return with the 10 commands. However, the filmmaker's adaptation does not look like a faithful representation, yet more like a carefully composed installation. Pantaleón works with the local environment to make a sharp statement against the hypocrites who state they venerate God / Yahweh, yet their only idol is money. He pays respect to the oral culture by using a choir resembling ballad singers and points out de-spiritualized spaces. Abundant in fixed shots, his short film resembling oil paintings is a poetic allegory rooted in the Canary islands cultural heritage that along with other proposals appealing to mystic imagery, such as ABIGAIL (2016), DUEL / DUELO (2017), or DADYAA (2016), constituted the section’s provocative exploration of spiritual crises.

[festivalists]

António's spell

When Lola was running on the streets of Berlin in 1998, it was the cyber-excitement for interactive storytelling that repositioned her again and again on the starting point, up until the happy end. In the Lisbon-set ANTÓNIO ONE TWO THREE / ANTÓNIO UM DOIS TRÊS (2017) by Leonardo Mouramateus (part fairy tale of a self-made man, part millennials romance, part austerity challenge), the eponymous protagonist seems to run towards a three-act change. Our new contributor Andreea Pătru met in Rotterdam the director of this charming feature debut and his film star Mauro Soares in order to deconstruct António's agenda. Three, two, one – start!

Leonardo Mouramateus is a young film director, already known for several highly acclaimed shorts. His MAURO IN CAYENNE / MAURO EM CAIENA (2013) and THE PARTY AND THE BARKING / A FESTA E OS CÃES (2015) both won the Best Short Film prize at Cinéma du Réel, and STORY OF A FEATHER / HISTÓRIA DE UMA PENA (2015) screened at Locarno Film Festival. Born in Brazil, Fortaleza, he shot his first feature ANTÓNIO ONE TWO THREE / ANTÓNIO UM DOIS TRÊS (2017) in Lisbon, where he currently resides.

I had a chance to speak with Leonardo Mouramateus, and Mauro Soares, who played António, was kind enough to translate and participate in our conversation at IFFR, where the film premiered in the Bright Future Competition. Working with the possibilities of multiple representations of its protagonist, the director parted the film in three segments that delicately influence and interact with each other. In this triptych, not only the protagonist’s personality changes, the surroundings and his peers are also given slightly different roles. The film reaches its full potential as a whole because of the strengthened interrelation between its units, giving sense to isolated sequences that fit better into the bigger picture.

António is a student who leaves university to follow his own path in Lisbon, hiding away from his father at his ex-girlfriend’s apartment, a place where he has been the most happy. Leonardo Mouramateus’ film moves away from the conventional and classical narrative forms, and dares to approach a fresh and subversive type of plot. He controls very well the dramatic shifts in his stories by mastering a cinematic grammar of his own, a unique approach for a debut. The film depicts the youthful feelings and connects the constant evolution of its characters with the instability of the millennials’ world.

Andreea Pătru: In the description of your film, you state that the movie is inspired by Dostoevsky’s short story White Nights. To what extent did that work influence yours?

Leonardo Mouramateus: The movie is not directly an adaptation of the work, it is influenced as much as it is from the work of other authors like the poem of Nicanor Parra, Roberto Bolaño, a novelist that I really enjoy. I could talk about the influence of not only writers, but also from music or other pieces of cinema, like Charlot, because my protagonist is a little bit like him, and Lubitsch. Maybe Dostoevsky gained a little bit more attention because in the movie the director chose to adapt it for his theatre play too… and also because it was very fit for the things we wanted to talk about – youth, dreams…

AP: The main character plays various roles, but the majority are related to theatre. Why theatre, what is your relation with this art?

LM: Before cinema, I made theatre in Fortaleza, so for me it was the starting point to get used to a certain type of language, to work with a group and collaborate. Also, a lot of the people, with whom I work now, are related to theatre. I liked it because you can also express with your body, make jokes, the mise-en-scène, even if you are poor. Moreover, the theatre exerts a power over the imagination that interests me in cinema, its limitations are tools to explore my creativity. One of the most important things was my contact with João Fiadeiro, the actor who plays the father in the film. He is also a great choreographer, I got in touch with his system through one of his workshops, and I learnt about realtime composition. Even if it is not that strict of a method, it made me think of the self-sufficiency, of composition, and construction without the author as the master. Everybody, all the parts of the crew are important. Also, theatre appears in my film for its capacity of reconstruction and also because of its lively creativity, you can watch how ideas are born, and I also liked to illustrate the process.

AP: The three-part story you have chosen is an interesting tool for developing your plot. The stories merge into one another by repeating the characters, yet giving them different character development, to the point we do not know which story is the real one. Which was the first part you have developed?

LM: We shot the movie as it is presented, in the exact same order: one, two, three. After I shot the first part, we stopped for six months, and so on after each part. I do not know how would have looked if I changed the order, because I never experienced it. Maybe chronologically it wouldn’t be so visible, but the changes in the development of the character would be affected. There is something that changes and grows from the beginning to the end. For instance, in the first part we present the characters, in the second part there are other questions for António, and in the third one his issues from the previous parts are explored and get solved.

Mauro Soares: An observation, if I may: in a way, the character develops through the stories, since in the first one he has no perspectives whatsoever, then he goes from being a technician to the director of the theatre play.

LM: Yes, exactly. And somehow everything and nothing changes, because the only thing that changes is António. He crosses the three segments in an almost linear way, because we can assume he learnt something. He left school, but he knows enough to become a technician, and then because he lives in that basement and he is always there at the rehearsals, he also learnt something about acting, so that he can direct in the third part. So to me they are all linked in this way.

AP: Did any production limits restrict your intentions for António’s versions?

LM: Since I started making movies, the production and the writing were very well connected. To me the two come together and function together, they are not restricted to one another. To me, it is not important to put something crazy in the movie, like a whale or something. I am not attracted to far-away scientific experiences, I like to express what is important to me. I am attracted to words, funny little jokes, love stories, how people react when they are mad… and I have put that in my films.

AP: Talking about production and the formal structure of this story, how did the editing influence your previous intentions from the shooting?

LM: Since we had so much time in-between the shootings, we put the parts together so that we could follow the influences from the first part to the second one and so on. Even if sometimes things did not go as planned, one option was to change that, or even better, we thought of ways we could assume that and use those problems in our favor and put them in the film. Sometimes an error or an extra take were exactly what we needed. Because I could write after the previous part, I felt I can introduce something that did not feel well-fitted into the first one and make it work.

MS: For instance, I remember, when we were rehearsing, and we talked about the thing that António smiled when he ran away from his father, we thought the scene would be too heavy, and we did not want such drama. The intention was to have some youth to it, not like an inter-generational fight between father and son, so I proposed I could smile.

LM: Yeah, and I used this scene that otherwise looked intriguing as a discussion in the theatre group in the second part. These things inspire me, and I put them in the script accordingly. We were creating the film while it was creating us. I was an organically project that grew with us through the process.

AP: How would you describe the relation between reality and fiction for your own characters?

LM: There are no imaginary versions of António’s story, everything is reality. There is not one valid version and the other ones – dreams. The point is that, to me, the reality is not single-layered. Of course, maybe I can create an António four for five, but all these layers are as important to me as the first one. I intermingled António’s life with aspects from his play, because I had no desire to separate life from theatre. There is no lie or truth. To me, it is important to notice while watching it that everything is present.

MS: If there is a character that could be a little bit more aware of these different layers of reality, it is the neighbor, because she could cross all the stories. She is also passionate about tarot, maybe the cards can read the other dimensions, she can predict. [laughs]

LM: Yeah, because the same could be said about us as the creators of this film. There is also some kind of António plot that is also about us as filmmakers. The reality is composed through this metalinguistic declinations of the plot.

AP: Did you have in mind the same actor for all the three stories from the beginning?

LM: No. Firstly, because when I met Mauro I saw he has a tremendous talent in playing a variety of characters, and he was exactly what I needed, a comedy brunette guy. Another point is that there is only one António, even if he is present in three parts. It is the same character in different situations, reacting differently to the given environment and its changes. In some way, António is also a little bit like Johnnie, a guy who is heartbroken, and also Deborah in some way is like him, because she also left university. The most logical profile to me is that there is something of António in other characters, because he is not a single-sided character.

AP: Was it a challenge for you to re-direct these scenes in a different way?

LM: No, not actually. I had this idea of directing, and I knew some things would have to change from the first to the last part. But the things I wanted to change were very practical. Not only directing the actors, but also the mise-en-scène, the crew. For instance, in the first part António is more lonely, he does not interact that much, the relations are more closed. In the second part appears Johnny, that is like a mirror image of António, so I have to pull back the camera to fit these two people. The crew understood they have to mould, not only by my ideas but other factors, too. Aline Belfort, the photographer of the film, had to adapt too, because the parts were shot in different seasons, we started in winter, and the second part was shot in summer. She had to adapt to make all these changes in the way she was dealing with light, because of the materiality of what we were doing.

AP: How was for you the transition from short films to features?

LM: It came naturally, because my shorts were already lengthy, I have shot shorts of 30 minutes. In a way, you can think of my movie as a collection of three shorts, it is some kind of homage, although it is not a short film. Its rhythm, the approach is different. There is always this pressure for us, shorts filmmakers, when would we direct a feature. Like a grand transition should be expected. I was at this Mariano Llinás’ Anti-lab, and he was speaking exactly about young filmmakers that go through all sorts of workshops, mentoring, trainings, project development labs, and their scripts are destroyed by many experts. For me, it was important to start the project without this pressure and grow it organically.

AP: The iconic song I Put a Spell on You is a key diegetic piece in each of these parts of your film. Why did you choose to make the character sing it, and was its purpose within the work?

MS: Leonardo wanted to see me in the theatre, and he heard me sing a song from Jaques Brel – Ces Gens-Là. It was a very romantic moment, appropriate for the feeling of his film, so he wanted me to sing it in the movie. I did not want to repeat myself, since I was already working on the same piece for the play, so we chose Nina Simone’s I Put a Spell on You. [cover of Screamin' Jay Hawkins’ original]

LM: And also it was maybe the most important element to connect the parts. The song crosses over. It was not thought of before since I did not have the script for the second segment, yet it naturally stand out as an element to link. At our second screening here, a music teacher from Amsterdam came and said that to him the film has the structure of music. I liked this comparison, I do not create films with the structure of a song in mind, but I like to use the structure of a song to help me deliver my film. The electronic music that accompanies the images was also very specifically placed, the beat having to come in a specific moment and taking into account these details.

AP: Could you please expand a little about the relationship between Johnny and António? Is it symbolic, like putting Brazil and Portugal in comparison, since like the character, you also emigrated?

LM: Not really, but the Brazilians and the Portuguese will always have their differences. My personal experience inspired me to put this into film.

MS: It is interesting, because Johnny is also a Brazilian director who goes to Lisbon to direct his first big thing. He wanted somehow not to prove himself, but to produce something that is significant. He is his alter ego, in a way… [laughs]

AP: Yes, but to me, all the characters oscillate between Portugal and Brazil. They all seem to go or return from somewhere. António seems to be the only stable element, why did you choose that?

LM: I never thought about it that way, but António has no problems with going or staying in. It is Johnny’s and Deborah’s issue. That is not a question for António. He just wanted to be independent in Lisbon, living without his father’s support, without money, without even a home… in a way, he does an extreme gesture.

AP: You were commenting about his social condition and him not having money, and there are these screwball comedy elements in your movie. Do you feel that this style, which goes back to the Big Depression, is still actual to comment on the social conditions nowadays?

LM: The point of these comedies was not documentary, although it was meant to comment about the United States at that moment, and how money controls our lives and the way we think our relationships… Like in the comedies of Lubitsch, a comedy like NINOTCHKA (1939) is absolutely amazing and very actual. It is not only a satirical critique of communism but also comments on capitalism, and all of this while it is a dialogical film about love, love as a great principle, a political one also. I think that considering nowadays’ situation this is radical.

AP: Does the Portuguese or Brazilian cinema inspire you?

LM: I have always been moved by filmmakers like Eduardo Coutinho, or Pedro Costa, or Ernst Lubitsch, you know. Chaplin is also important to me. But before filming, we watched two important shorts. One was João César Monteiro’s WHO WAITS FOR THE DECEASED’S SHOES DIES BAREFOOT / QUEM ESPERA POR SAPATOS DE DEFUNTO MORRE DESCALÇO (1970), a film that also has a poor protagonist, wandering around in Lisbon, also heartbroken, like António… And it was also this other one about two guys who don’t have money to go to the cinema in Sao Paulo, so they do not enter, they just read the list of films, inspect the posters. I liked the feeling of these stories, it was very similar in a way with the plot that I was developing for ANTÓNIO ONE TWO THREE.

AP: I wanted to ask you if you have seen the films of Hong Sang-soo? He is also interested in these slightly different changes of plot. Do you want to pursue something as intransigent?

LM: Yes, I admire his work, and I think RIGHT NOW, WRONG THEN / JIGEUMEUN MATGO GEUTTAENEUN TEULLIDA (2015) is an amazing film, but there are other directors that followed this path also, like Alain Resnais. I think that my influences are more from the literature, that is why I have chosen an adaptation as an excuse to explore different narratives. I have heard Hong Sang-soo showed what he filmed to the actors. In a way I avoided that at the beginning, because I was a little bit skeptical about it, I did not want the actors to close the character’s development. But in a way it was good because everybody contributed to the story. Even the photographer, Aline Belfort, she is Brazilian, but she went to Russia to study photography, and she returned to Lisbon to shoot our film. So her personal story coincides with Deborah’s.

If you are a film industry professional, you can watch ANTÓNIO ONE TWO THREE on Festival Scope

[festivalists]

Despite the distance

Photos: courtesy of Jeonju International Film Festival

Yes, you all want to know what we know about Cannes, only before heading to France we will make one elegant step back, so we can tell you more about a phenomenon in French cinema that has been making waves in the past months. This phenomenon is not new, actually, for Philippe Grandrieux has enough films for a retrospective at Jeonju International Film Festival titled The Rediscovery of Cinematic Language. It is just that his latest feature DESPITE THE NIGHT / MALGRÉ LA NUIT (2015) has been trending worldwide like none of his previous works. Luckily, our special envoy Clarence Tsui was in Jeonju to talk with Philippe Grandrieux about philosophy, rejection, Dostoevski, and hands. Cap ou pas cap?

Giorgio Agamben. Gottfried Leibniz. Gilles Deleuze. These were just some names Philippe Grandrieux reeled off as he explained the raison d'être of his work at a Q&A session at the Jeonju International Film Festival. It was a deep, dense, and daunting discourse, but the mostly local audience was hardly dazed by it: a ceaseless stream of very substantial questions pushed the French filmmaker into ever more intellectual analyses of his films and the inspirations behind it.

This scenario basically repeated itself at nearly every screening of the Jeonju festival's retrospective of Grandrieux's oeuvre, including a sold-out masterclass-cum-screening of the French filmmaker's latest film DESPITE THE NIGHT / MALGRÉ LA NUIT (2015). It was a crowning moment in the extensive programme, which comprised: all four of the director's fictional features – SOMBRE (1998), A NEW LIFE / LA VIE NOUVELLE (2002), A LAKE / UN LAC (2008), and DESPITE THE NIGHT; two documentaries – BACK TO SARAJEVO / RETOUR À SARAJEVO (1996), which follows an exiled businesswoman's return to her home city after the deadly civil war in Bosnia, and IT MAY BE THAT BEAUTY HAS STRENGTHENED OUR RESOLVE - MASAO ADACHI / IL SE PEUT QUE LA BEAUTÉ AIT RENFORCÉ NOTRE RÉSOLUTION - MASAO ADACHI (2011), about the Japanese militant-filmmaker; and the first two installments of a triptych – WHITE EPILEPSY (2012), MEURTRIÈRE (2015) designed for both theatrical screenings and art installations.

At a meeting the next day in a third-floor cafe overlooking the traditional Korean-style houses making up Jeonju's famous cultural landmark Hanok Village, Grandrieux said he is very pleased about his experience – a solace given what he described as the "violent rejection" of DESPITE THE NIGHT by major festivals. Unlike SOMBRE (with its award-winning premiere in Locarno), A NEW LIFE (which bowed at Toronto) and A LAKE (with a special mention at the Venice Orizzonti sidebar), DESPITE THE NIGHT, a French-Canadian co-production, premiered at Montreal's Festival du nouveau cinéma before traveling to Rotterdam, Berlin (for the Critics' Week parallel section), New York (for the Film Comment Selects programme at the Film Society of Lincoln Centre), and the University of Chicago. The film will finally open in France in July.

Compared to SOMBRE (about a sexually twisted serial killer and a woman who survives his attack but then falls for him) and A NEW LIFE (about an American soldier's efforts to track down a beloved sex worker in an Eastern European sex-trafficking ring), DESPITE THE NIGHT is definitely less abrasive. Sure, a character is shown taking part in the making of snuff movies, but here the on-screen menace is more Lynchian than lurid. The film begins with a young man, Lenz (Kristian Marr), returning to Paris, after a year's absence, to track down a vanished girlfriend. Bar a fuzzy polaroid, the viewer never gets to see this mysterious figure named Madeleine. Neither would Lenz, and instead he engages with two women: Lena (Roxane Mesquida), an all-singing, all-dancing party-girl who radiates youth, energy, beauty and Helène (Ariane Lebed), an older, more jaded woman whose ordinary daytime existence as a caregiver in a uniform in a nursing home belies an obsession in self-destructive nocturnal activities.

Confronting the film's smoky, shadowy world and a vision comprising mainly of close-ups of the characters' faces and bodies, the spectator is coerced into following Lenz's opiated dream of a journey through a purgatorial Paris – never had the Jardin des Tuileries appear so menacing on film before – and ending with a devastating revelation straight from hell.

But there is more to DESPITE THE NIGHT than the narrative, something Grandrieux has, in the past, somehow dismissed as a necessary tool through which he could explore concepts and ideas in his work. At the centre of his film is Leibniz's 1714 philosophical tract Monadology or, specifically, the ideas about the composition of human beings and their existence in a general scheme of things. Simply put, Leibniz believes that there is a single "monad" – the soul, at once obscured and in control of the multi-monad composite that is the body. This relates to Grandrieux's recurrent depiction of characters imploding as their base/basic instincts devour the physical facade and take over.

Meanwhile, there is Leibniz's belief that despite representing "the whole universe," each monad "cannot all at once unroll everything that is enfolded in it." That is, how each soul – or in this case, character – is essentially the same, but would only be reflecting certain traits of this whole. This explains how Lena and Helène could be seen as just partial mirrors of Madeleine, and how the man who seeks and "collects" all these different individuals is called Lenz (that is, a multiple of “Len”, a phoneme which appears in all the women's names).

These are things which Grandrieux happily agreed to expand on during an hour-long conversation conducted in English at Jeonju – one which began with his views of feeling liberated while miles away from home, as he is now living in Boston as a Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard.

Clarence Tsui: Do you sense that foreign audiences, for example the one here in Jeonju, respond to the films differently from audiences back in France?

Philippe Grandrieux: I think so, but you know it's very strange because like what we say in France, nobody is a prophet in his own country. So when you go abroad to Asia, Mexico, or New York, or Moscow, all your work is considered with totally different aspects of these cultures. So, yes, it's different in this sense. And also I feel the audience in Jeonju is very particular, they are asking very precise and intelligent questions about the movies.

CT: Do you feel more liberated when you are presenting your films outside France? People at home might have more preconceived views of your films, but those outside France might be more open about them.

PG: What is different is that I'm French when I'm screening in France, so all the detailed reactions – all the signs, all the gestures, like [the way] somebody moves their eyes, I understand something. It's more clear in a way. But also, it's more difficult. In France, particularly, my films are very strongly rejected or loved, it's very, very divided. And I have to make do with this, because even to do another movie I have to find money, convince producers or the CNC. It's the place where I'm fighting for my movies, and it's not easy. So I'm more inside the arena. When I'm abroad, it gives me more freedom, it's very nice and very helpful. And also to see how all the films are working with these different audiences, it gives me the strength to... you know, you can't make movies and be totally alone with your movies, you'll go crazy. You need... interaction.

CT: You were talking about rejection – I read from another interview that you said DESPITE THE NIGHT was rejected by festivals.

PG: Yes, all the festivals, where my movies normally go. Locarno don't want [the film], Toronto don't want, Cannes don't want, of course. So it was a huge wave of rejection, very violent rejections. But there is a lot of explanations about that – the main explanation might be that we didn't have an international sales agent and it's very important because they deal with festivals. So it's just my producer sending the film to all these places. [The film has since found reps in the form of Films Boutique.]

CT: Can you talk a little bit about how DESPITE THE NIGHT came into being? Maybe, firstly, the title?

PG: In fact, "malgré la nuit" is a [translated verse] from a poem by San Juan de la Cruz, "aunque es de noche." The idea is that we are going through these difficulties in our lives, but there is something more – it could be fate, love, there's something you can escape from darkness. It's more on a general sense of the human condition, that we are fighting, all of us. If you are in Jeonju, Mexico, or Paris, the human condition is the same. Of course, there are cultural distinctions, but love, anxiety, and all these human emotions were built with this. So, I try to make movies dealing with this human condition.

CT: DESPITE THE NIGHT looks like a subverted take of the Orpheus fable – a man goes to find his wife, descends to hell, and discovers an unspeakable truth, something which also happened in A NEW LIFE...

PG: In this movie, in fact, when I was writing it, working on it, I was reading Dostoevsky. I was reading the new translation [of The Idiot] into French, by Andre Markowicz, an incredible and very beautiful translation. In it, you feel like he's always running after something. That is very important for me, and for the movie. Lenz is like [The Idiot's protagonist] Myshkin. One of the important currents in the movie, this aspect of a guy who's always out of breath, always searching for something, always trying to grab something which escapes from his hands like sand. Another main direction is, one I have worked with my co-writers [John-Henry Butterworth, Bertrand Schefer, and Rebecca Zlotowski], is Leibniz's idea of monadology – the idea that each of us, inside of us, we have the totality of the universe. In this totality we are, you are, and I am, a certain expression of it. You have a certain quality that I haven't, me also, but we are coming from the same form. This is a very important idea to construct the movie because all the characters are more or less in the confusion: Lenz, Lena, Madeleine, Helène, even in the nature of the names. In fact, it's only one thing expressed by different aspects, different figures... There's infinity inside of us. We are qualities of this infinity. Even the fish has the total possibility of the universe, but it expresses one or two qualities only. It's a very beautiful and very strong idea.

CT: I always find it interesting how you use animals in your metaphors – you just mentioned fish, and you also talked about tigers and insects in terms of the action or the composition of the soundtrack. What do you see in animals, do you think they represent something human beings are not, but something we might want to be?

PG: Animals are very common things, but they are very important, their intelligence is made by other possibilities. They haven't so much the knowledge of the finitude as we do. So they [act] totally within their necessity, and they have no doubt about their necessities. Tigers might not think about whether to jump on its prey, it doesn't think, "I should not jump" or "Maybe it's not good to jump." It doesn't get depressed about what it does, that strength is so powerful!

CT: So it is the ability to act out of animal instinct.

PG: This is a big question, our relationship with animality. I read recently something very beautiful from [Frédéric] Cuvier, and he said instinct is just like a somnambulism: [it leads us to think] we must do something but we don't know why we're doing this. I don't know why, but I want to access this possibility to life. Sometimes we do, for example, in a sexual relationship – we can access the orgasmic moment. Something blows up, and you access another level of reality. I'm very fascinated about how we are under the control of a lot of rules and laws, and we don't have access to that bare life.

CT: Does Helène embodies this obedience to a social order? During the day she is a nurse, she wears a uniform, and her action is very regulated, and people have expectations of her being kind and generous. But in the night she takes part in all these activities...

PG: Yes it's true. She tries to reach something, she's a very strong person and not at all under the control of anything or anyone. She wants what she's doing – she wants to go into the forest and find the pain and everything. She's not a weak character... To be able to approach this, you need to have another relation with your body. It's like all these mystics, like in Santería.

CT: Is this why you repeatedly feature characters suffering from epileptic fits? In a way, this condition resembles the struggle the body has in containing something from inside, a struggle between the body and soul?

PG: What's fascinating for me is how Dostoevsky described very precisely the crisis [of a seizure], and just before it arrives, everything becomes white – as if you have the access to all the universe. It gives you an incredible knowledge, and after that the attack arrives and rocks the body and leaves you more or less dead. But this moment is like the door to the unconscious, and you can look to something else. This idea that you can access this part of a human being is very important and strong.

CT: In the Masao Adachi documentary, you asked him how he would define “a world of ideas versus a world of sensation.” He had his answer in the film, what is yours?

PG: It’s beautiful what Adachi said – that we begin with sensation, we go through intelligence, but at the end it’s all about sensation. It’s exactly what Proust said in Contre Saint-Beuve, in the beginning of the prologue, he said he doesn’t care about intelligence but only sensation – because through that you access memories. I have the feeling that you can be very intelligent, you can conceptualize a lot of things, you can be very, very clever and manipulate all the concepts and everything, but at the end it’s not working. For me, to access life itself, that’s what I try to do, but I know we fail. But I tried again and again, movie after movie, to be more and more close to this pure sensation of life.

CT: In that documentary, Adachi said a world of ideas is all about these blocks of things, while the world of sensation will be like a river. To apply that to filmmaking, can we consider his view of "blocks" as an edited narrative, while a "flow" will be long takes of movements and unexplained action and emotions?

PG: It’s very important, what you said. Twenty years ago I made a series for French television called LIVE (1990), and it was the idea to shoot one hour without any cuts, to access reality through the real duration of time. Yes, it’s a very important idea. Also in [Henri] Bergson, there’s this tension of fragmentation of the elements [in life] and the construction of these fragments into sense, while intuition lies in the flow of duration itself. But I think, maybe it could more than just the fragmentation of editing, but also the way you’re shooting. When I shoot, I shoot inside the movement, I don’t do one shot here and there, and do the cuts. I’m shooting inside the duration itself. I’m in the flow, not outside looking at them. That’s why people say how you could get the actors to go so far for you. Because I’m not looking at them as a voyeur, I’m not making judgements, and I’m inside the scene. It’s very important to be inside the flow, dans la fleuve, in the current.

CT: Watching your previous films, there is a physical movement which constantly appears: an image of a hand reaching out, from the POV of the camera, and as if from behind it, and touching something. It is there in your early documentaries, like THE LABYRINTH / LE LABYRINTHE (1989) or BACK TO SARAJEVO, it is there in your features, like A NEW LIFE and A LAKE. What does that imply?

PG: You know, it seems strange but it’s true – it seems that I’m making movies more with my hands than my eyes. It’s not the question to look and make a good frame and composition. Who cares? It’s a question of rhythm. And the rhythm is in the hands, not the eyes. If you see a conductor, like [Herbert von] Karajan, the music comes from the hands. I make movie with my hands much more than anything else. I believe in it very strongly when I shoot – my hands drive me inside than what I’m looking at.

CT: That is why hands figure so much in your films. A NEW LIFE begins with Boyan plodding and pushing human bodies. A LAKE starts with a close-up of Alexi's hands chopping at a tree. In his documentary, Masao Adachi's hand pushes the swings where his granddaughter sits. You don’t see the people, is it a deliberate way of emphasizing the hand as the agent?

PG: Even when I’m doing it, I’m not doing that consciously but, yes, you’re right.

[festivalists]

Ecology meets romanticism meets documentary cinema

Ever since LOST AND BEAUTIFUL / BELLA E PERDUTA (2015) premiered in Locarno, the buzz of adoration followed pronto. The start of 2016 proved very successful for the film as well, with three consecutive gigs: Rotterdam, Göteborg (The Ingmar Bergman International Debut Award), and Istanbul (Most creative intervention). So we are truly elated by the chance to talk to filmmaker Pietro Marcello and scriptwriter Maurizio Braucci, all thanks to Paula Arantzazu Ruiz!

Cinema verité, a sensitive approach to the rural culture of Italy and the use of the archive as a bridge that links the past and the future are some key elements intertwined in Pietro Marcello’s films. Born in Caserta, in 1976, Marcello debuted in the documentary cinema in 2007 with CROSSING THE LINE / IL PASSAGGIO DELLA LINEA, selected for the Venice Film Festival’s Orizzonti sidebar. Soon followed his first full-length feature THE MOUTH OF THE WOLF / LA BOCCA DEL LUPO (2009), an evocative film focused on the love story of Enzo and Mary and also a love letter to Genoa (Italy). THE MOUTH OF THE WOLF not only won the Best Film honor and the FIPRESCI Prize at the Torino Film Festival but picked the Teddy Award at Berlinale, too, among many other trophies, thus putting Marcello in the “to watch” list of European industry and cinephilia. After delivering a biographical documentary about the great Armenian artist Artavazd Pelešjan with THE SILENCE OF PELEŠJAN / IL SILENZIO DI PELEŠJAN (2011), the Italian filmmaker follows up on his poetical work that lies in-between fiction and documentary with LOST AND BEAUTIFUL / BELLA E PERDUTA (2015).

LOST AND BEAUTIFUL fuses documentary and some fairy-tale elements by telling the story of Tomasso, a humble shepherd in the Campania region who volunteered to look after the abandoned palace of Carditello, owned once by the Bourbon dynasty and threatened nowadays by ruination due to the state’s apathy and the mafia. Sadly, Tomasso succumbed to a heart attack during the filming of Marcello’s documentary, but far from stopping the project, both Marcello and his scriptwriter Maurizio Braucci decided to continue and offered a beautiful response to that fatal situation: to fulfil the last will of Tomasso, a Pulcinella, a very well-known character from the commedia dell’arte, emerged to rescue and took care of a male buffalo called Sarchiapone that was under the protection of Tomasso before he passed away. Ultimately, LOST AND BEAUTIFUL is a movie about a journey from Southern Italy northwards that fuses the public and the private story of a country, as the title of the feature stands, beautiful and lost at the same time – a place about to disappear but still alive on the edges of memory.

Paula Arantzazu Ruiz: How did you discover the Royal Palace of Carditello, and how the LOST AND BEAUTIFUL story was born?

Pietro Marcello: The idea was to make a movie about the countryside of Italy. We wanted to focus in the region of the Campania and then make this trip from the South to the North. And at the Campania we found Tommasso, the shepherd of this big palazzo. We started to follow him, and we discovered this story about this little buffalo that was left behind just because it was a male. For those, who are not familiar, in our modern industry, male buffalos are felt useless even for reproduction, because female buffalos can get pregnant via artificial insemination. So, as male buffalos grow and grow, they become so huge, it is quite difficult to maintain them alive. By following Tommaso, we discovered he saved this male buffalo, and at some point we wanted to tell the story of both. He saved the animal, but the animal soon became an orphan again when Tommaso died.

PAR: It is then when you introduce the character of the Pulcinella. Could you explain us a little more about why did you decide to use it?

PM: After two months recording Tommaso, he suddenly died. So Maurizio and I made this very simple script about this character, Pulcinella, a character that is in between the living and the dead. It is a very well-known archetype of the commedia dell’arte.

Maurizio Braucci: The idea was to make a fairy-tale. Our starting point was Tomasso, and, after he passed away, we started to develop the character of Pulcinella, who was to guide the orphan buffalo. But we decided to use the character of the Pulcinella because of other reasons. The story is strange – when we arrived with the buffalo at the North of the Lazio region, we found there was a colony of a very important Etruscan village, a site with archaeological remains. Coincidentally, we found that among those remains there was too one of the oldest figurines representing a Pulcinella,

PAR: From the very beginning of LOST AND BEAUTIFUL you can feel its fairy-tale atmosphere.

MB: Actually, the story has a lot of elements from the fairy-tale background: this simple shepherd who takes care of this big palace and in a way he becomes a sort of priest, just because he domains this area, this sort of kingdom. This is the first fairy-tale you can find in LOST AND BEAUTIFUL. Besides, of course, there is the story of the buffalo.

PAR: LOST AND BEAUTIFUL also stresses environmental issues such as toxic rubbish, pollution, and the people who fight against them.

MB: In LOST AND BEAUTIFUL we wanted to focus as well on the struggle between money and nature. We are convinced that all current conflicts are linked to environmental issues: energy, climate change, greed for fossil fuels are behind the political wars and the migrant movements. We are very influenced by the theories of Joan Martínez Alier, a Spanish academic who developed the concept of “the ecology of the poor” after travelling for a long time along the southern countries of the world, searching those areas and studying them thoroughly. What does the concept “ecology of the poor” mean? He says that the very core of what is ecology today has changed, and the citizens of the developed countries are no longer the main advocates of the environment politics, but the people from those countries are affected on a daily basis by the pollution and the toxic garbage. They are defending their rivers and their mountains not because they are political activists but because they want to preserve the land they inhabit.

PAR: Did you have in mind this ecological statement from the very beginning when dealing the production of LOST AND BEAUTIFUL, or was something you developed while filming your documentary?

MB: We have had it in mind before the shooting of the movie. We come from a land, where this struggle is very strong, the region of the Campania. It is the place, where most of the techniques of modern agriculture were born, even before the Roman Imperium. It is a volcanic area it used to be a very fertile land till now, because it has become a rubbish dump. It is nonsense but it is also in our nature to be self-destructive. People from Campania have fight against this situation in a way that relates this fight to the theories of Joan Martínez Alier.

PAR: In the documentary we see several demonstrations, but I was not sure if those demonstrations were against the Camorra, the politicians, or against the increasing of contamination on the area around the palace.

PM: When we were filming Tomasso and after he passed away, there were those spontaneous demonstrations against the pollution, the contamination. People from the region, farmers and their families, demonstrated against the construction of a rubbish dump. There is a big dump only two kilometres away from the palazzo. And of course, they also demonstrated against the Camorra and the politicians. But they mostly perceive the Camorra as a tool against the apathy of the state. They feel protected by the mafia. They are the local power.

PAR: How society has permitted such a beautiful place to become a rubbish dump?

PM: Sadly, this is a very usual situation in Italy. Our countryside is so rich in terms of history and archaeology that we do not care till we have found ourselves in such critical situations. Perhaps the time of building a new relationship with the land and with our environment has arrived.

PAR: I am interested in the use of the archival footage in LOST AND BEAUTIFUL. Unlike THE MOUTH OF THE WOLF, in LOST AND BEAUTIFUL there is a limited use of the archive, and, actually, I would like to point out that the footage does not look as archive footage.

PM: I used these material only twice in LOST AND BEAUTIFUL. First, we see a traditional fair of the area years ago; the second section shows those night diggers that are looking for archaeological remains. They do not look like archive, but they are indeed. I like to work with archives: it is a material that helps me to achieve my idea of what cinema is. Maybe it can be seen as a nostalgic feeling, a feeling that stresses what we have lost. Certainly, archives represent the memory of the past but archives are also important in the way they help me to look forward, so I can understand better the future. It is a struggle between what we have lost and what can be improved. But yes, in a way LOST AND BEAUTIFUL is a nostalgic documentary.

PAR: Should you say you are filmmaker who deals with nostalgia?

PM: My world is nostalgic. The nostalgia is there, you can find it in my films, but it is complicated for me to make such a statement.

PAR: We were talking about ecology, nostalgia, and how modern civilization affects negatively our environment and, ultimately, our culture. Do you feel that we are going to be able to heal all the damage that has been done?

MB: Pasolini was very concerned with this issue, with the idea that in Italy we have lost the beauty without no compensation. We have lost part of our civilization, and today we have this mixed feelings that we live in the same country as always, because our landscape is still the same, but at the same time the souls of the people had changed radically. On the other hand, we have learned that the southern regions of our country work as frontiers, where all the decisive fights take place. It is not only a question of standing against builders and golf courses. All this fight has also a lot to do with educating audiences.

PM: There is this discussion always going on about the future of cinema, and, in that sense, I am conscious about the possibility of not filming anymore. I feel that audiences are decreasing, and we have a lot of problems with the issue of distributing features that are risky in terms of what they tell and how they tell it. But for filmmakers like us, it is important to continue making movies, to show that different cinema exists, and to find new ways of making cinema.

If you are a film industry professional, you can watch LOST AND BEAUTIFUL on Festival Scope