By Leonard Cortana*
You have shot six films and Is the City Only One? is your first feature length documentary. The thing your films all have in common is the exploration of the city of Ceilandia, which becomes a character itself. What did you specifically discover about filming in Ceilandia during Is the City Only One?
I have lived in Ceilândia almost all my life and therefore have made it a character in all my films. I have been fascinated with the city because of the way it was formed. Ceilândia, which stands for CEI – CAMPAIGN FOR THE ERADICATION OF THE INVADERS, was founded through trauma, in opposition to the epic genesis of Brasília.
In 1971, around 80,000 people were taken from informal settlements around the new capital city, Brasília, thrown into army trucks with their families and a few belongings, and dumped 40 km into the cerrado, in a supposedly new city that didn’t have water, electricity, or any support from the state. At the time, Brasília was only 11 years old and was completely sanitized and made to look beautiful. This was nothing short of a territorial abortion!
Ceilândia appears in opposition to the modernity discourse advanced by Oscar Niemeyer. Is the City Only One? is my first feature. I conducted the research for the film in public archives, libraries and newspapers. I was initially fixated on displaying reality in the film in a conventional way. However, through the process of filmmaking - and through negotiations with the characters - I developed a desire to affirm the people of Ceilândia, to claim our identity in the space. This is why we put the construction of the city in the narrative.
I chose to use my understanding of the past to create a better future, instead of simply using it to “reveal” our present day conditions.
As l shot the film l became increasingly interested in memory and territory. I was most interested in exploring memory as something dual and dynamic, and that memory operates best in a dialogue that helps you to understand where you came from and who your peers are. But the memory of Ceilândia should be told by us, by the generation that had been aborted from the official narrative of the Federal Capital. We are the only ones who can tell the story of the spaces put at the periphery. It can also be told through our quotidian praxis. These approaches are full of contradictions and various expectations of how the future can possibly be narrated.
Sound and music play an important part in your films and are used to immerse the audience in multi-sensory travel. What is your process in adding this layer to the film?
One of the things I like most about cinema is sound. I am interested in the way sound triggers memory and creates new visual realities. For Is the City Only One?, I worked with Guille Martins, who taught me how to translate this feeling into the films. The process departs from an immersion into the city, especially into what we imagine we might have heard. For example: you can tell someone how you interpreted a sonic moment, without necessarily needing to be attached to the material that was recorded in the moment. Again, what we were interested in was in a projection towards the future, and not necessarily a realistic sense of sound in the present. Moreover, and in general, the characters in my films often have an embodied relationship to music: some are rappers, popular brega music singers or, forró singers. The city is constantly immersed in sounds that get to us before images do. I introduce sound before the image, followed by the the full picture of the sound. This is how you experience sound on the street, you hear the street vendors with their cakes, sweets, meat, the sizzling sound of grillers, the incessant noise of the bakers’ machines, etc. Ceilândia is not a city ruled by the subtleties of silence. Here the emergence of announcements dictates the rules. I try to make this present in all my films.
The film was shot almost 10 years ago – what does it mean for you to screen it today in 2019 in the Veredas retrospective?
It means a lot to me. I am very proud to be part of this group, and to share it with directors who are a significant part of contemporary Brazilian cinema. I think the film has at its core a feeling of distrust towards a Brazil that was moving towards the conciliation of classes. On the other hand, we believed that we should break with the old political model of reconciliation. We believed - the group of people who made this film - that our history should be told as we tell a story on the street corner, an alley, or a side street of a great Brazilian periphery: a story in which we have the possibility of being the main characters, and to create a series of interventions. The questions around whether we win or lose at the end of these narratives, that’s a different story.
In the curation of VEREDAS, is there a film or a filmmaker in the series that particularly inspires you?
The entire group of filmmakers in the program has influenced me. Our films have been circulating, and in some cases are still on the exhibition circuit. It was important for me to see these films, and learn both their technical and aesthetic possibilities. I used them as interlocutors for discussing what I might agree or disagree with, both aesthetically and ideologically, when I was making my own work. I believe this is a very important and generative generation of filmmakers, who have taken the opportunity for visibility that the films provide, and therefore having ended up representing a certain moment in Brazilian cinema. Today we are standing in front of another Brazilian cinema: new voices, new models for production, and new ways of narrating the anguish of many years of imposed silence. I have a profound and particular admiration for Tavinho. The anarchic and sincere way in which he makes his films motivates me very much to think about the films I make myself. Sol Alegria is another extraordinary film, his work is intriguing, full of layers that make me reflect deeply about this moment in the Brazil we live in.
Is the CIty Only One? will have its New York premiere on Friday, December 6 as part of Cinema Tropical’s Veredas: A Generation of Brazilian Filmmakers at Film at Lincoln Center.
* Leonard Cortana is a PhD Candidate in Cinema Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts and a 2019 / 2020 Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University.
