Focus

Manuela Serra is a veteran Portuguese filmmaker who has made just one feature film, the wonderful O Movimento das Coisas (1985), recently restored by the Cinemateca Portuguesa. It is not out of the ordinary for careers to come to a sudden halt in cinema, particularly among women. Manuela is visiting the festival and will chat about her film and how she was forced to distance herself from the world of cinema in a session with the filmmaker, programmer and former member of the Punto de Vista programming committee, Mercedes Álvarez. We are also shining a dual spotlight on Sofia Bohdanowicz and Payal Kapadia, filmmakers for whom our colleague Lucía Salas has programmed a selection of films sharing the same genre, archive fiction. Much is said about archives from a documentary perspective but what about their fictions? Sofia Bohdanowicz and the researcher Sonia García López will talk about the adventures and misfortunes of the archive in the eyes of researchers and creators.

Manuela Serra

O Movimento das Coisas

Manuela Serra, Portugal, 1985, 88 min, DCP, Portuguese

Stories from a daily routine of silence. In deserted byways troubled by a worrying wind, in a village in the North. There is a day’s labour spent by three families: four old women, the countryside, bread, the hens, and to remind us, clearings of time-worn stories of actions savoured in the mineral bite of words. A family of 10 children on a farm plunge into the depth of time in the labour-laden action of the father cutting down a tree. Further on the water of the river inhabited by people, in a boat, the Sun and the village centre, the bridge under construction, the verandah, the meal, the density and mysticism of Sunday, the mass and the local fair: the ritual practice of Saturday. Isabel moves against the fragments of this scenery, she too with her gaze to the future, beyond all the others for whom life is no more than living.

Time goes beyond sunrise and sunset. Life is inhaled using the countryside as a medium in a village of the North with its slow and ancient activities. It is a pause in life through things and their dislocation in time; values; silence…

Teresa Sá, original synopsis 77

Manuela Serra studied film at the Institut des Arts et Diffusion (IAD) in Brussels from 1971 to 1974. She worked as an assistant editor, mainly with archive material, for the film Deus, Pátria, Autoridade. She co-founded the VIRVER Film Cooperative, where she worked as a scriptwriter, producer and editor. By then, she had already worked as a producer and assistant director on several medium-length films and on Rui Simões’ film Bom Povo Português. Between 1979 and 1985 she produced, directed and wrote the screenplay for her first work, O Movimento das Coisas. In 1990, she began writing the script for a second film, Ondas, Ondulaçoes or O Movimento das Ondas, which was never shot.

Archival Fictions

So my children live with my mother, and so far they do not have worn-out shoes. But what kind of men will they be? I mean, what kind of shoes will they have when they are men? What road will they choose to walk down? Will they decide to give up everything that is pleasant but not necessary, or will they affirm that everything is necessary and that men have the right to wear sound, solid shoes on their feet?

Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues

What will the worn-out shoes of film be like? Perhaps they lie behind Rossellini’s wise lie: “Things are there; why manipulate them?”. Much of contemporary film exists in a minimalist, opaque, excessively mysterious field (the question is whether there is anything behind so much fog), as if they had sound shoes because they don’t use them much. There are other films that find a mid-point between the extreme austerity of excluding anything pleasant but unnecessary and the radical hedonism of declaring that everything is necessary. They have sound shoes not because they’re not loaded with money, but because they look after them well and use them wisely. They are films that take the things that are there and alter them slightly to make them more true. They use them to build considerable structures that we can call fictions. They narrate thinking of narrative as a process of translation between things and the structures we build with them. In the case of the two filmmakers who make up this programme, what they take are documents, archives from the past, to turn them into characters in a

narrative. They also take the same process of research and mould it into fiction. Rather than the idea of “vintage”, of a fetishistic nostalgia, both filmmakers take these documents as equals, as if they were actors with whom they discuss a scene before shooting it. Perhaps they do so to overcome the horror of archives, which is the fear that things will be forgotten or mislaid among the millions of boxes. Perhaps because they mistrust the public character proclaimed by the institutions that keep them, in the awareness that free of charge does not always mean free of restrictions. The films that make up this programme are materialist because they take the form of the materials of which they are made, mutating as necessary, but without bending their will completely before others, before the authority of the archive. These archival fictions are sculpted from this tension between the document and its narrative, a group of films made with fascination, charm, fury and action.

Curated and notes by Lucía Salas

Session 1 Payal Kapadia

Payal Kapadia is a young filmmaker from India who this year premiered her first work, A Night of Knowing Nothing. Someone (who?) finds some letters in a pigeonhole in a film school in which a young woman, L, writes to her forbidden love, K. L and K are from different castes, and it is impossible for them to be married (even today). In her correspondence L not only sends messages of love and despair, but also news of the struggle K has had to give up, following his parents’ orders. Students at the Mumbai film and television institute rise up against the caste system and financial insecurity, joining protests spreading increasingly widely around India. Created with material from her own time at university, made with her friends and colleagues, Kapadia organises a fiction that contains as much melodrama as agit-prop. The short film And What Is the Summer Saying? is an earlier exercise that shares the same universe: being, seeing, observing, discussing and, from these conversations, sounds of time passing, sketching out small scenes and narratives that take place in one summer in Maharashtra district.

And What Is the Summer Saying?

Payal Kapadia, India, 2018, 24 min, DCP, B&W, Marathi

A Night of Knowing Nothing

Payal Kapadia, India-France, 2021, 96 min, DCP, colour-B&W, Hindi-Bengali

Session 2 Sofia Bohdanowicz

In 2016 filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz and actress and writer Deragh Campbell created the character of Audrey Benac, an archive detective. Made from autobiographical fragments of both of their lives, snippets of family stories and collective invention, Audrey investigates little moments of history that have been forgotten. In Never Eat Alone she explores the past of her grandmother, a former actress and singer, and an ex-suitor with whom she starred in a famous television music programme. Veslemøy’s Song seeks out the footprints of Kathleen Parlow, a famous violinist at the time of Glenn Gould and the first woman to study at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, but today completely forgotten. Roy Thomson recalls her grandfather, a former student of Parlow’s and a member of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and the presence of the dead in the spaces in which they lived and worked.

Never Eat Alone

Sofia Bohdanowicz, Canada, 2016, 68 min, DCP, colour, English

Veslemøy’s Song

Sofia Bohdanowicz, Canada, 2018, 9 min, DCP, B&W, English

Roy Thomson

Sofia Bohdanowicz, Canada, 2018, 3 min, DCP, sepia, English

Session 3 Sofia Bohdanowicz

In MS Slavic 7 Audrey Benac discovers a series of letters between her grandmother, poet Zofia Bohdanowiczowa, and Józef Wittlin, both of them Polish exiles from Nazism. Audrey comes up against the difficulties of investigating on her own, trying to come to terms with the political and poetic importance of these papers while, none of those around her —family, experts and archive— let her do everything she needs to. Loosely based on The Year Of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, Point and Line to Plane finds Audrey mourning the death of a friend. She visits places and ideas that linked them, trying to extract the colours and lines of Kandinsky and above all of Hilma af Klint, another forgotten pioneer. In the last two episodes in the saga of Audrey Benac so far, Bohdanowicz and Campbell explore different ways of joining the intimate and the historical in concise narratives that enquire into that special mechanism in the world that effaces women.

MS Slavic 7

Sofia Bohdanowicz, Deragh Campbell, Canada, 2019, 64 min, DCP, colour, English

Point and Line to Plane

Sofia Bohdanowicz, Canada, 2020, 18 min, DCP, colour, English