In Sob a chama da candeia, we are are mainly focused on one female character, Alzira, with Alzira child, mother, grandmother. What interested you in this character? Why working in this film with Eva Ras, the Serbian actress you had evoqued in How I Fell in Love with Eva Ras (FID 2016)?
The character Alzira is based in my grandmother and her life. Better, there are for me 3 characters, her, the housemaid Beatriz and the house. And they are the 3 connected. So maybe what interested in find about my grandmother was the affection that I have with her, with Beatriz and that house where I spend some time during a long period. Maybe is the place that for more long I created memories, and the place that more people told me stories about, that also became in my head like my own memories.So, of course I’m totally interested in my grandmother’s life. But I believe that the more important in the film was taking consideration something that António Reis said to Joao Cesar Monteiro about Jaime: I was interested in the life of a man and, without beating about the bush, it seems to me that it could only interest other people if we could convert that man’s life aesthetically, since he himself could no longer defend himself, or attack, or even not be interested. I don’t know. If you ask me why, I can say that I identify with his conflict and that this conflict is identified with practically everyone in Jaime’s position.”. I was writing this script when my grandmother was still alive and I wanted to film her, and to make this film, and I don’t know when I read this interview and was like reading what I wanted to do about my grandmother’s and her life, and Beatriz and that house. So it created a big impact on me. Then the time passed and my grandmother passed away so I gave up about the idea of making the film. Then I went to Saravejo and I met Sena, who played a role in a film about her life and Eva Ras, the film you mentioned, a “fictional life” through films, let’s say…, in a very minimalist way. And luckily I was presented to her, in a very beautiful gesture from Belgrade’s Slobodna Zona Film Festival, bringing her to watch that film I made. When I got support for the film I thought that she would be the perfect person to play the role. There was something in her tenderness or the eyes expressing something between a zen world and a kind of inner sadness, or something like that I just found in very particular persons. Alzira, Sena and Eva, they have that in common for me. They all gave me so much hope in life, as well as Beatriz and Márcia, the Portuguese actress who plays Beatriz.
We are inside a house, very rarely in the the garden, in front of the house. This claustrophobic atmosphere was important from the beginning?
It was like that. It was like that in reality. There’s a church, a garden, and a house. Unfortunately when we got funds to shoot only the church was like that. So the garden was like a jungle, the interiors were a ruin. Only the magnolia and the tills and the wall between the street were like before. So I Guess the claustrophobic atmosphere you feel it’s the claustrophobic sense of a house, or at least that house. For many years there were ghosts for me in those walls, and I couldn’t never pass the corridor during the night, or go upstairs to the attic. I mean it wasn’t plan, was just the away I felt that time or at least my memories are like that. Also the life of Alzira and Beatriz became like that; they almost never would leave the house. And my memories of both are inside that house.
The outer world seems very far, except some details (the photograph, the newspapers) and the outside world only guessed beyond the windows.
All outside things that are “coming from outside” are there because they were there in my memories and in the images I filmed during the time my grandmother was still alive alive and even after. So it’s was totally based on that. I wanted to recreate the house during different times, and if there was a Tv, newspapers, radios, or photographs they should bet here, not as a metaphor but because it’s something from that image. Or something from that sound like the bell that is always playing in that
house because it is in front of a church. That bell created always a very strange felling of “chronological time control” for me, that probably start to want to feel another time when I was there.
Very few words, attention to the gestures, long shots give the film its very genuine atmosphere. What led to this?
When my grandfather was alive that house was always a silence place. In almost every memories I have, he was “upset” so everyone would stay in silence until he stop to be upset. Only in very few rooms when there were kids playing there were noise. After you grow up you would be there in silence on saying few words. After my grandfather’s death the house started to be more noisy, or I start to heard more, I don’t know.
And about the importance of the housemaid, Beatriz. Can it be read in a political meaning?
Everything is political. Every shot, every sound that you put in film, or something you do in life. But for me Beatriz, when I was a child she was also my grandmother in the sense I would talk even more deeply or be more close about something with her. I couldn’t say which one was my grandmother so that feeling kept, so remembering one, it almost impossible without the other. So is not a political meaning in the sense that I wanted to bring a message or talking about class struggles because I don’t feel cinema in that way, but I feel the political question in the relationships between human being are there. We are political in our relationships. Of course it can be read in every ways.
House maintenance, domestic activities play an important role in this film with its minimal actions, balancing between a discarnate world and a material everyday life.
There is perhaps a side to the routine that becomes less material at times. And food and domestic activities join people who live together. The meals are important moments of a community in an house. Other moments are moments of being alone, doing something, or taking care of yourself. They’re like little moments within a time that sometimes stretches out and only with that extension can those moments emerge. But it’s in habits that they emerge when I review images in time in my head. And from routine come those moments that are more the fruit of dreams, or boredom, or loneliness, or the desire to be alone.
Childhood, with sometimes its dark and serious side, is very important in the film.
Most of my memories are connected with that period, so I think it come automatically when I think something about me inside that house. And as well as things that probably are between my memories and the memories that I have about things that other people told me about their memories. I believe that is something close to that.
Interviewed by Nicolas Feodoroff
