Interview with Caru Alves de Souza By Sofi Abouassali 1 Department of Cinema Studies, 2School of Environment, 3 Second-year undergraduate of Innis College, University of Toronto Caru Alves de Souza is a director, screenwriter, and producer from Sao Paulo, Brazil. She is a partner in Tangerino Entretenimento, a production company based in Sao Paulo. Her debut fictional feature Underage (2014) won Best Film at Rio IFF and was licensed by HBO Latin America. Her second fictional feature My Name is Baghdad won Best Film in the Generation 14 plus section at the 70th Berlin IFF. She is also a member of Coletivo Vermelha, a Sao Paulo based group of female audio visual professionals.
“How did you begin writing, directing, and producing?” I did my major in History, I didn't go to film school, but my parents are filmmakers in Brazil, so I was always in this environment of film. I grew up in it, so when I was studying History I started to make some money by working in film festivals as a producer or an intern. I worked at MTV, but at that time I thought it was only to make some money because I was studying. But when I finished college I realized I didn’t want to work as a teacher or as a researcher, and I was taking a script course even though I don’t know why because I didn’t want to be a screenwriter, but in that course I realized that’s what I wanted to do. So it was by chance, but not completely, because I was very close to a film environment.
“My Name is Baghdad explores a full range of expressions of femininity in its characters, as well as responses to these varying expressions through the use of other characters. What made you want to explore this?” Well since my first film I was always concerned about how women were depicted in films. This concern began to be more present in my life when I started to be a member of Women’s Collective in Brazil, and we began this collective to think about how women are represented in films, and that is when I started to do My Name is Baghdad so it was built together with this. One of the things that makes me very angry is when I see films and women can only be this or that. This is not new – everyone’s talking about it now, but I mean five or ten years ago no one was, this idea was very new. So when I started My Name is Baghdad I thought, “okay as a woman I cannot be writing and directing this film and allow there to be only one type of woman.” So it was very important to have different bodies, different stories, different ages, and different accents. There are people from all over Brazil in the film.
"The film makes use of documentary-style shooting within the story context of the feature. Does this come from previous work on documentaries or a love of the style?" Actually, this was more a result of the way I wanted to make the movie. I didn’t set out to do a documentary style, but it was more a result of some thinking. I didn’t want to tell the actresses and actors how they had to move and how they had to talk. For me, My Name is Baghdad is a film about people, so the people were more important than the machines. That’s why the camera follows the actors and actresses and why we improvised a lot. We rewrote the script with the actresses and that’s why we didn’t have lighting with all this paraphernalia. I didn’t want any of that. I said to Raphaelle that I don’t want to wait three hours for the crew to make the set and then thirty minutes to shoot the scene – let’s do the opposite. It was important for this film that it was made like that. I didn’t want to make a movie about skateboarders or about women. I thought this film should be a result of collective collaboration and that’s why it’s more documentary-style. Screenwriters’ Perspectives Vol. 3 No. 1 2022
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