By Leonard Cortana*
In your previous collaborative film Café com Canela (2017), you made references to cinema and films within the film narrative. Ilha / Island (2018) goes further and bases its narrative on the making of a film. Can you tell us more about these explicit references to cinema? Does it relate to the urgency of shaping a more visible Black Brazilian Cinema?
We did not make clear choices before the start of the shoot. Instead, the language of our film evolves from the shoot, as if both are born together. Each film follows its own process. Instead of imposing our directorial footprint on each, we believe film languages are specific to each project. Our film language (or meta language) is composed of different movements that developed in concert with the actors, the team, and the film location. In our films Café com Canela (2017) and Island (2018) the references we make to cinema illuminate and make more visible the Black spectator. In both films, the protagonists have a relationship with cinema whether they are cinephiles or filmmakers. In a way, they replace characters that were subtracted and subjugated in the history of hegemonic cinema.
An exciting corpus of films that tells stories from the peripheries is more wildly circulating inside and outside of Brazil. These films renew a "genre" popular in the early 2000s to a global audience. Today, you inscribe this cinema in the powerful metaphorical landscape of an island. What have you discovered in the process of translating it to a new landscape?
My co-director Ary Rosa (also screenwriter for the film), referred to the island landscape in the screenplay, and we already selected the shooting location as Ilha Grande, in the Camamu / Bahia peninsula. The history of Ilha Grande has been shaped by stories of abandonment and is reflected not just by its community but the landscape itself which is empty and rusty as it struggles to survive the passage of time. This is where Emerson and Henrique meet, and although the island seems inhospitable at first, it turns out to be the ideal place to explore the characters’ dilemmas. This is a metaphor for Brazil in which both the margins and the periphery embody the possibility of innovation, experimentation, creative freedom, and take attention away from the vices of what we commonly call the “center.” The margins amplify our film language and protects the affect, memory, and survival of the human in motion.
The film was shot in 2018– what does it mean for you to screen it in the 2019 Veredas retrospective?
Island is a film in a constant process of transformation. This might be the vocation of cinema itself that suffers a certain historical “abrasion” as the years go by. We made the film at a moment that foresaw the conjuncture of a Brazil that is now different.
When we screened Island in Brazil, the critics and the public described the film as a “resistance movie.” But today, a year later, after attending several national festivals, I read it better as a “movie of existence.” The film embraces the possibility of being and existing for subjects who are once again put at the margins and must survive the denial of their existence.
Is there a film or filmmaker in the Veredas retrospective that particularly inspires you?
It’s strange to talk about our references because we co-direct our films with divergent approaches that meet at a certain point. Rather than being inspired by the other directors or their films, we find inspiration through the flux of the everyday, through life. Our point of reference is our home, the territory of Recôncavo da Bahia. This place has inspired us to build a history of Blackness, affect, and memory. Reconcavo is our identity, our language.
Island will have its U.S. premiere on Saturday, December 7 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.
