Carlos Bolado, Pablo Lobato and Gustavo Acioli
Film directors find Poetry in their Search
Carlos Bolado: A Trip through Two Countries’ IdentitiesAs the only foreign director with an international career to compete for the Petrobras Award for Cultural Diffusion, Mexican Carlos Bolado said he made Only God Knows as a way to relate his home-country’s culture with that of Brazil, a land that lives in his imagination from an early age. “When I was still a teenager, my father made me read Captains of the Sands, by Jorge Amado, which at the end I enjoyed very much. Soon thereafter I read Quincas Borba...”. That’s why religious syncretism is so important to conduct the story and determine behavior rules of his main character, Dolores de Maria (Alice Braga).
In his character’s spiritual journey, beginning in Mexico and ending in Salvador during a procession for Our Lady of the Sailors, Bolado tries to make films of questions and not of answers. Without wanting to be Messianic, he works with spirituality in a more collective sense that announces, for example, that people living today do and reflect what their ancestors provoked. It’s not a reincarnation case, but karma bequeathed to the people. In this sense, the film is a true tour de force for Alice, because the camera follows her all the time. Dolores is always present. At a certain point, her character meets a journalist, Damián (Diego Luna), almost an alter ego of Bolado. Both characters are orphans and stay together in this trip, searching for faith and identity.
He still observes that his film is extremely liquid, because there’s a lot of water, sweat, urine and sexual fluids. To give a definite shape to all this, editing was very important, and it was done by Bolado himself, an educated editor, and by Manuela Diaz. To him, the editing of a film in cooperation with someone else is like playing piano four hands, defining the musical sense of the scenes and their concatenation. Another vital element to the work, inevitable due to the plot’s nature, is the soundtrack. He asked Otto to write the incidental soundtrack, since Otto knows candomblé and deals a lot with drums and percussion. He worked on three tracks with Mexican singer Julieta Venegas, including a version of the song “Lágrimas Negras”, by Jorge Mautner. He still selected, following Bolado’s request, tracks by Tom Jobim, Dolores Duran, Moreno Veloso, Interpol, The Libertines and Nortec Collection. To check out this syncretic mixture, you have to wait the “medium release” of the film, as Bolado himself referred to it, on December 9th.
Pablo Lobato: From Poetry one Makes Films
There are 853 municipalities in the State of Minas Gerais. If one eliminates the ones that are named after saints or the ones that have names of native Indian origin or with the suffix polis, there are only 600 left. Of these, only the ones with gracious, rhythmic and expressive names were selected. There were still 200 left. So, Pablo Lobato and Cao Guimarães made forms with these names and started a game that included poems, essays and screenplays. The result can be seen in Accident, a feature film that arose from the name of twenty of Minas Gerais’ cities, which were transformed into a poem. In an interview with Jornal da Mostra, Lobato explained that his intention was to put on screen the casual and the commonplace, whatever went on either behind or in front of the camera. Initially, he and Cao wanted to tell the story behind the origin of the names of the cities, but they realized that they should give more room to the accidental trend that surrounded them. Cao and Pablo directed, wrote the screenplay, photographed and edited Accident, which is part of the 30th Mostra`s film selection.
But this feature will still go through some finishing touches when it is transferred to 35mm. In the first semester of 2007, the film will be screened outdoors in the cities where it was shot, since they do not have movie theatres. It will also be commercially distributed in seven capitals: Belo Horizonte, Recife, Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Porto Alegre and Fortaleza. It is expected to trigger debates, as it has occurred in all the places where it has been shown. Although Lobato does not worry so much with the response, the response is already happening, because when the film was screened at the Locarno Film Festival, it received many invitations to take part in festivals in other countries.
After making such a special film, is it more difficult to think about the next one? Lobato considers Accident as a landmark since it was very powerful. He reports having “unlearned” a lot from it since it gave him the liberty and pleasure to make. He also said it triggered both great and relaxed tension. There is always the anxiety for the public`s response and immediate acknowledgement, but Lobato says he tries to let things happen naturally. Although this is his first feature, he has been in cinema for ten years. After Accident, Lobato has also made a medium-length fiction film, Autumn, which will be released on November 9th. It is also one of the four films to receive funding from the State of Minas Gerais.
Gustavo Acioli: A Director of Few Actors
Born in the State of Rio de Janeiro, Gustavo Acioli is the first to acknowledge that he was very brave to chose an original play (not yet staged) as the base of The Incurable Ones, his début as a feature film director. “After seeing it done, I thought I was even braver”, he jokes. But he explains that what caught his attention in the original text by Marcelo Pedreira was the existential impact between both characters in the same setting. “I ran away from the theatrical trap, because I didn’t want a colloquial translation of the text. When I was editing and preparing the text, I looked for a cinematographic language”, he adds. The film didn’t have a storyboard, and Acioli just counted on a mockup of the room to rigorously study how to position the cameras. Everything needed careful thinking, even though many of the best solutions came out of the impromptus by him and by director of photography Lula Carvalho and art director André Weller.
In order to work, Acioli always begins with a personal dogma: “First, I check if I can shoot the scene in just one take. If it’s not possible, then I check what I can get rid of. If I still can’t find a solution, that’s a sign that the scene needs more decoupage.” With Lula, son of master Walter Carvalho, Acioli has also taken care of the room’s transformation – it begins in the dark with very well defined light spots, and it gradually clears up. “This is very rare nowadays, but we always made dailies to check the light’s coherence”, he says.
As for the fact that he only worked with two actors, one with basically theatrical formation (Fernando Eiras) and the other very used to the cameras (Dira Paes), the director says that the film became more tridimensional, which is very good because the opposition between both characters are many times shown in subtexts, and each actor offered their own ways to better translate the plot. And the small number of actors will also be the mark of his second feature film, O Jardim de Infância de Adão e Eva, a serious adaptation of the biblical myth in a 100% original screenplay, 95% silent and whose third character will be God. What an incurable talent for the subliminal!