The Cypress Dance, The Cypress Dance

We’ve known Mariana Barrote (the female character) for years, since childhood and university. We wanted to film in her region because these landscapes are so vivid in our memories, and we return there regularly, and because Mariana (Caló) is also from there. We went to the beach, explored the marine ecosystem, walked along cornfields and meadows strewn with daisies—places that have long been synonymous, for us, with fruitful encounters.

We wanted to film this family because we found them astonishing and beautiful to watch. Henrique reminded us of a Pasolinian or Dionysian figure, Artur and Rafael of wild children, a kind of faun. As for Mariana, she immediately inspired us with her way of dedicating herself body and soul to drawing and painting, and her way of listening to her daydreams and integrating them into her daily life. One day, she told us that she had dreamt about us, and that in her dream, we asked her for a key so she could go running at night in the forest, which she found very dangerous. For us, this was a sign that it was time to tell her about our desire to film them, freely, as they explored nature.

We were fortunate enough to commission Eyvind Kang and Jessika Kenney to compose this original score. We have long admired their work, feel a deep connection to their music, and it seemed perfect for the direction we envisioned for the film. They became involved in the project very early on, allowing us to share texts, images, and other references that informed their compositions, though they were, of course, completely free to compose as they saw fit, with their own ideas and lyrics. The song heard at the beginning and end of the film is one of the stunning results of this collaboration. The lyrics they chose are taken from Astrophil and Stella, a 14th-century collection of sonnets by Philip Sidney, which follows Astrophil’s musings on platonic love and the bewitching powers of beauty. For us, this song draws interesting parallels with the film’s content, evoking the mythical intertwining of life and love, and poetic visions of intangible connections between inanimate, sentient, and insentient beings.

As for our decision to include it twice in this way, we wanted to highlight the notions of cycles, the projection of one being onto another, and heredity. The same field of flowers appears at the beginning and the end, but while at the start we encounter the couple there, at the end we encounter the children and the ghosts. Similarly, at the beginning, the music adds an extra layer to the images and the relationship we intuitively perceive between the characters on screen, but in the final sequence, it evokes a space outside and beyond the film.

We studied painting at the Beaux-Arts, and we have always viewed different artistic practices, as well as the creative impulse in various contexts and periods, with interest and curiosity. This interest played a central role in the making of this film.

The drawings were created during filming, but they perfectly reflect Marina Barrote’s personal work. She approaches life and artistic practice in a semi-conscious, dreamlike state, which greatly inspired us. Her drawings seemed essential to expressing, in this sequence, the idea of ​​a continuity of being and existence through eroticism, dreams, and death—recurring themes in our work, which also lie at the crossroads between art and life.

Our creative process often begins with a visual element; filming is present from the very beginning of each project. In the case of this film, we were able to take advantage of a great deal of space and freedom to experiment with various locations and explore different relationships of presence. It was on the basis of this ecosystem of collected images and experiences that the first sequences were born and the overall vision of the film’s structure took shape. By spending time with the four elements, new directions emerged and permeated the film’s anatomy. Through a process of accumulation, consisting of collecting materials and experiences over two years, we were able to establish cross-cutting links between events that occurred in different places and at different times. Ultimately, we wanted to show the inner world of a dreamer, this space made of projections, phantasmagoria, waking dreams, desires, and enchantment.

Mariana generously shared recordings of some of her dreams with us, along with personal literary references. Calypso was among these texts; it seemed to us that it perfectly expressed feminine eroticism and that it resembled the character, both as a woman in search of pleasure and as an artist whose works are nourished by her own sensuality. We sought to express the mysterious nature of Calypso, described in an almost impressionistic way in this poem. The text reveals this nymph of mythical beauty, emerging from the depths of the island that holds her captive, though she emanates from it. One sequence in the film in particular is inspired by Valéry’s text, the one where we follow Mariana through a rocky landscape as she discovers a marine ecosystem composed of sea urchins, starfish, seaweed, shrimp, and periwinkles. She reorganizes this system, as if in a divine gesture, and as she caresses a sea anemone with her fingertips, an intimate and synesthetic link is formed with her sex, which transforms into her double, Henrique.

Throughout the film, we reflect on the continuity of being and the ephemeral nature of existence. These small beings remind us of this fleeting nature, but at the same time, they are naturally present in the places the characters inhabit. There is a sense of inevitability inherent in every being, regardless of its size. The starfish was also interesting because of its multiple reproductive cycles, as many specimens reproduce asexually, by fission, to produce new stars (a method that reflects the organic process so beautifully described by Georges Bataille in his book Eroticism), while others are hermaphroditic, an image that the previously described sequence might suggest.

The connections between the texts in the film are numerous, but we were primarily interested in the evolution of love, continuity, and the projection of one being onto another, as well as eroticism and death, to which love is ultimately linked. This excerpt is read by Henrique at the moment the children appear, which we envisioned as a reference to the couple as an expanding organism. We wanted to evoke the idea of ​​reproduction and the specters of heredity through descriptions of continuity and discontinuity as fundamental events in the lives of certain living beings.

The title came about quite early in the film’s development process, in 2017. At that time, we didn’t yet know very well whether we were going to include trees or not, but deep down, we were fascinated by the suggestive power of the cypress’s undulating movement, as a symbol of passage, resurrection, and eternal life.