By Marina Mendes Gandour
In conversation with Cinema Tropical, acclaimed Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho spoke on the importance of public funding in the filmmaking process and the ways in which his own films react and respond to contemporary life and politics. “It’s not really about the market, it’s about public policies,” said the filmmaker, calling attention to the recent fragmentation that has been going on in his home country of Brazil, particularly in the arts. Over the course of the conversation, Mendonça Filho also referenced his own trajectory from journalist and film critic to filmmaker and how that part of his life has informed the films he's made so far in his already very successful career.
Fascinated with the surreal elements of everyday life and the methods through which personal politics infiltrate the ways people interact with their worlds, he noted that he makes sure to be in contact with information; to always be in tune with what’s going on around him “because what’s going on in the world is so absurd.” His process is to then turn those observations into ideas for his films.
The conversation took place on June 2nd as part of TropiChat 20, an ongoing series of conversations with key Latin American directors and film professionals taking place as part of Cinema Tropical’s 20th Anniversary celebrations, and moderated by Cinema Tropical’s co-founder and Executive director Carlos A. Gutiérrez.
Although his latest film Bacurau, co-directed with fellow Brazilian filmmaker Juliano Dornelles, has an element of science fiction, Mendonça Filho’s work is known for its social commentary and connection to contemporary politics. Neighboring Scenes, for example, is based on the director’s own neighborhood in the city of Recife in the Northeast of Brazil, and is a product of many of his own observations living there. His next feature, Aquarius, was released at the Cannes Film Festival alongside a protest regarding the end of the Ministry of Culture in Brazil, an instance where Brazilian public funding for cinema was threatened. The story of the film itself also serves as an anecdote of resistance, and connected directly to what was going on in Brazil at the time in regards to former president Dilma Rouseff’s impeachment. Finally, Bacurau, despite its sci-fi elements, also aims to depict, through its fantasy, elements and characteristics of the Bolsonaro government and the rise of a sharp conservatism in Latin America’s largest country.
Mendonça Filho highlighted how such public policies have been fundamental to the production of his films. “During the Lula years,” he noted, “there was a very dramatic shift in the way the government looked at culture.” Coming from the Northeast, which, according to the director, “always had the short end of the stick” when it came to culture, this marked transformation finally allowed the more rural and historically under-funded region to have as many projects supported by the federal government as the more prosperous and densely-populated Southeast of the country (dominated by the tandem economic and cultural powerhouses of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro). This increase in public funding in the arts, Mendonça Filho says, had the notable effect of diversifying the nation’s filmmaking community beyond their respective region, as well as in regards to race, gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality. “It was almost like a revolution,” he reflected. This shift was also the moment when Mendonça Filho decided to finally write the screenplay for his film Neighboring Sounds, an idea that had been in his mind for years but that gained strength and felt possible in this new era.
During the conversation, the director, who attended the public Federal University of Pernambuco, explained that he pursued a degree in journalism since his state school did not have a film department, but throughout his college years had always tried to lean towards themes that would bring him closer to cinema. Working as a journalist after completing his degree taught him to look at society and tell stories about reality: as he explained,“when you start working at a newspaper, you realize that things aren’t that romantic.”
Over the course of the dialogue, a common thread arose around the tendency of the film industry to label disparate works of film. Mendonça Filho encountered this pattern first when he was cast as a “video-maker” rather than a “filmmaker” because he wasn’t working with the film cameras that were common to cinema, like 16mm and 35mm. Instead, he made use of the cameras that were available to him through the university and that were accessible to him for free. In fact money was not even something he considered, at the time, stating that the financial side to filmmaking “wasn’t even mentioned, because we spent close to nothing.”
Musing on this divide between the so-called “filmmakers” and the less-highly-regarded “video-makers” of the 1990s, Mendonça Filho sardonically reminisced that in this period, “you would get to a festival, you were finally selected with your little video, and you would slowly realize that the film people would be in the good hotel and then the video people would be in the crappy hotel.”
The digital revolution closed the gap between filmmaking and video-making: “everything just became cinema, it was beautiful,” expressed Mendonça Filho. It also made the practice of creating cinema more accessible, “all kinds of filmmakers began to make their films, and I was one of them.”
In another instance, the question of labels arises when Mendonça Filho tells Gutiérrez that he never made Neighboring Sounds or Aquarius with the intention of them being art films, despite that being what they were labelled as by the industry once released. “It’s just a system that puts [a work] in a box,” said Mendonça Filho, bringing up questions about what makes an “art film” in the first place. The director voiced several grievances in regards to the market tendency to put films into the “art film” category, critiquing the arbitrariness of making such categorizations based on such relatively small differentiators as the length of a film, the strangeness of the characters, the lack of genre, etc.
In fact, the director doesn’t seem to see much of a difference between “art house” and “commercial films.” He mentions the fact that he made Neighboring Scenes and Aquarius in very similar manners to Bacurau, although Mendonça Filho did identify one characteristic that he thinks made Bacurau “more friendly” to the general public, however, and which may be responsible for the fact that it is to date his most widely distributed film: the reality that it resembles classic Westerns, even though that wasn’t the main inspiration for the movie. Something that’s captivating to the director as people continue to watch the film in greater and greater numbers is the fact that more and more unexpected references continue to come up: “to this day, people are still discovering the strange film that Bacurau is,” he mused.
Gutiérrez refers to this aspect of the unexpected as something characteristic to Mendonça Filho’s films, saying that the director seems to always tread the line of surprise and follows his own desire, rather than searching for external validation. Although the director has developed a very specific style over the last two decades of filmmaking, he does recognize that one challenge has remained since the early days of his first short films, and that many filmmakers are bound to relate to: “[Deciding] where to put the camera,” he reflected, “is still the biggest challenge when you’re making a film.”
In closing, Mendonça Filho looked back at a symbolic moment in his life, at Cannes, when he officially saw himself as a filmmaker rather than a film critic. At the festival press conference, where he had been “a hundred times” in the past as a journalist, he was finally sitting at the table with the microphones, rather than on the other side: “It was actually a beautiful moment, I will never try to sound blasé about it, it was very special.”
A filmmaker with purpose, Kleber Mendonça Filho doesn’t hide the emotion he feels in creating films, but also goes beyond his own pleasure within his work while still attempting to engage with reality with lucidity. His experiences within the world of film, navigating public funding and the lack of it, are helpful when it comes to thinking about the structures that work and do not work as we attempt to move cinema in a direction of diversity and accessibility.
Watch the full conversation:
