Jorge Durán, Odorico Mendes and Fabiano Maciel
Perseverance Goes a Long Way
Jorge Durán: Two Decades on HoldTwenty years have gone by since the release of A Cor do Seu Destino, the first experience as film director of the acclaimed screenwriter Jorge Durán. Two decades later, he comes back to the screens with Forbidden to Forbid. He confessed to Jornal da Mostra why it took him so long to shoot again. He said that during all this time he had been writing screenplays and teaching in drama schools, giving workshops and doing consulting service in Brazil and abroad. According to Durán, he wanted to shoot but many of his projects never even left the paper. “I had a contract with Embrafilme to shoot a feature film in 1991. But Embrafilme was shut down and the production stoppeda altogether.” He wrote screenplays in Chile between 1992 and 1994 and independently pursued a project that was to be shot in Rio de Janeiro (a small part) as well as in the Atacama desert. He invested everything he had on this project, an original idea of his own for a low-budget film. He raised funds in Rio (with Sky Light) and a co-production with Germany, but he didn’t get the Chilean part of the production. “In 1995, I had already settled my situation in Rio when I realized I wouldn’t be able to make the film”, he confessed.
But he didn’t stop there. In 1998, Durán wrote a screenplay to be shot in São Paulo. The following year he won an award for best screenplay at a MinC (Ministry of Culture) contest. A producer from Rio took interest in him and raised money for the project for three years, but nobody was interested in joining. “Here no one showed any interest. In France, on the other hand, they’ve helped me with production”, he explains. The screenplay was selected for Cinemart, the projects’ market that runs at the same time as the Rotterdam Festival, and to the projects’ market of Mannheim (Germany). But the producer had given up, since his own country didn’t show any interest in the screenplay. In 2004, a new attempt: “I entered a project in contests. It was about a film to be shot in the Atacama desert, in Chile (where I live), with Brazilian and Chilean casting and staff, but once again I couldn’t raise any funds.”
At the end of 2003, Durán won the contest for low-budget films with Forbidden to Forbid. During 2004, he rewrote the screenplay with the help of a few other screenplay writers. The film was shot in 2005 and was ready only in 2006. Since he won the Cine en Construcción Award at the San Sebastián Film Festival in September 2005, which was the finishing parts of the film in Spain, he had to wait for the country’s labs until February 2006, when they would have space for his feature. “It wasn’t because of a lack of projects that I didn’t shoot anything. It was because of a lack of funding”, he confesses. Last year, Petrobras and Telemar selected Gabriel, à Sombra do Edifício at the sponsoring contests. The director hopes to shoot in 2007.
Forbidden to Forbid is about a group of young college people who have to face ethical and moral dilemmas because of a love triangle. Durán said he chose the characters to be young because he has always rejected the cliché that young people are not interested in anything, that they are apathetic. “To me, a young person is a person in transformation. By watching them I can imagine, or try to understand to where the country is headed”, he says.
Odorico Mendes: Literature on Screen
The feature film Master of the Sea, directed by Odorico Mendes, is part of the 30th Mostra’s selection. It is based on the novel written by former president José Sarney. Odorico says that he thought the story was very good and that the book has received many awards. Mendes had contact with the author when the latter was being paid homage at the University of Sorbonne in Paris. At the same time, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss had written a positive article about the book and the author. All these factors led to the making of the adaptation, says Mendes. Of course many difficulties arise when one adapts a book into a film, one of them being the film’s duration. Since there is a limited duration for films, sometimes great scenes are not used and have to be discarded. Mendes also had to deal with the lack of funding, as well as with problems that arose from special effects necessary in the story. This is why the whole production process took almost six years.
He is the son of musician Gilberto Mendes, who was the subject of the documentary A Odisséia Musical de Gilberto Mendes (screened at the 29th Mostra), with photography by Odorico Mendes. Master of the Sea included Gilberto’s music. The director explains that the musician just needs to watch the film and is inspired by the images. The director then gives the musician some indication as regards the type of music he wants for every scene. This was how this father and son partnership came about.
Master of the Sea already has a defined commercial release date. It will be distributed by Pandora Filmes and released on November 24. But Mendes is already working on other projects. One of them is Wink, a feature film that will begin to be shot the week after Carnival. This Brazilian-American co-production, with screenplay by James Aubrey, will have an international cast, composed of both American and Brazilian actors. Some of the actors in the film include: Grainger Hines (from CSI Miami) who has already been hired, and the Brazilians Luciana Gimenez and Dado Dolabella, who are still studying the script and may also be part of the cast.
The Brazilian feature A Padroeira is another one of Mendes’ projects that will be financed by the Rouanet and Audiovisual laws in force since 2004. The shootings will start in October 2007, the month of Brazil’s patron saint (Our Lady of Aparecida). The cast is composed of actors from England, Portugal and Italy. It is a romantic comedy that tells the story of a casual date between an Italian reporter who comes to Brazil to do research and a videomaker who is hired by the newspaper to do interviews. A Padroeira is expected to be released in Brazil in August 2008.
Fabiano Maciel: In Defense of Niemeyer
Oscar Niemeyer is one of the fathers of modern Brazilian architecture. For this reason, it should be easy to raise funds to make a film about such an important man. This was what Fabiano Maciel thought, director of the documentary Oscar Niemeyer – A Vida É um Sopro who is participating in the 30th Mostra. But in 1998, when the battle began, he realized it was the exact opposite. It has taken him nine years to finish the project. The delay, however, enabled him to talk a lot to Niemeyer, and from this constant contact with the architect, Maciel was able to make him break away from his usual speeches and to show him talking about his life in a more informal manner. The urge to make the documentary came from a lifelong interest Fabiano has always had in Brazilian architecture and from the desire to defend Niemeyer. He says it really bothers him when people criticize Niemeyer`s work saying they are aesthetic but uncomfortable, or when people say that he is old fashioned. According to the director it was Niemeyer himself and his generation of architects who put Brazilian architecture on the map. He adds that Niemeyer is a unique architect who has copyrighted work. “He has followers, but doesn’t have disciples to continue his work, since there will never be another like him”, he explains.
Maciel is not a fan of the architectural mixture one sees in the big cities of Brazil. He argues that current architecture is never better than Niemeyer`s. The film also does a good teaching job on Brazilian architecture. For this reason, it will settle partnerships with universities of architecture and design so that the film can be screened to the students. The feature will be distributed in April 2007 to the cities of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Brasília, Belo Horizonte, Curitiba and Porto Alegre thanks to the distribution resources given by Petrobras.
While working on this project, Fabiano finished two other documentaries: Vaidade (2003), shown by the cable TV channel GNT and Carrapateira não Tem mais Ciúme da Apollo 11 (2004), aired by Canal Brasil. He is already working on two other new projects: Sambalanço, about musicians from Rio de Janeiro and Fandango, about the culture of the state of Rio Grande do Sul. He has also begun to write a screenplay for a full-length fiction film, another one of his wishes.