In 2012, João Rosas started his chronicling of Lisbon with the half-hour short Entrecampos, named after the Portuguese capital’s neighbourhood. At its centre is Mariana, an 11-year-old from the small town of Serpa, who tries (and initially fails) to navigate the city to which she has just moved with her single-parenting father. It is only when she meets cheeky coeval Nicolau (Francisco Melo) and his would-be women whisperer elder brother Simão that things take a positive turn. Their relationship, at Rosas’ behest, is destined to last, though the Lisbon native, henceforth, shifts the focalisation toward Nicolau.
In his second short Maria do Mar (2015), Rosas returns to Nicolau, who experiences a spring awakening of sorts, amazed by the mysterious titular woman — all the while, as if to charge the anyway romantic air, practising his first set of magic tricks. It is a trait Rosas candidly took from his young collaborator and integrated into the script. If the Nicolau of Maria do Mar can be described as a boy who, enraptured by Maria’s sight, never really stops staring at her, this pattern, in a sense, is carried over to Catavento (2019), where the now-young man seems lost in a greater sense. There, he still follows the women in his life — especially those he’s infatuated with — in search of guidance. “In cinema,” it is said over the kitchen table in Maria do Mar, “no matter how much you try to make a dent, there’s no continuity. After the screening, they clean up and push reset. You can’t leave your mark on things.”
Something in this notion, it seems, resonates with Rosas, who, in a way, has found himself retelling the same story. Only that there is continuity — even progress — however subtle it may be. In the feature The Luminous Life (2025, feature image), which saw its international premiere in the Karlovy Vary Crystal Competition, the Portuguese filmmaker adds another chapter to the story of the now 24-year old Nicolau. And it might not be the last one: “It’s a possibility,” he said on the festival stage, concluding: “Cinema opens doors, and it’s a door that will remain open – to go back to his character; to work with Franciso again.” We spoke with him via Zoom about his ongoing cinematic project of mapping his hometown, the challenges of narrative openness, and the role women play both in his life and his films.
Where are you right now?
I’m at a film festival in the north of Portugal, Curtas Vila do Conde, which is a famous short film festival. It’s actually where I premiered the three previous short films. This time I’m on the Jury, so I upgraded my status.
Are you familiar with Letterboxd?
I know what it is, but I’ve never been on it.
Some of the commenters on there say they are your students.
My students?
Yes. Have you taught at a university?
Yeah, I have. But it was very random stuff. I taught for a semester during COVID, so it was very weird because it was on Zoom all the time. And it was a directing workshop, so it was almost impossible. In theory, it should have been a practical class, but everyone was at home filming with their mobiles. I’ve also done some random classes in fine arts in Lisbon, because I’m doing my PhD. And I did these workshops with kids, but I don’t consider myself to have a teaching position. Maybe in a few years, once I finish the PhD.
Oh, so you’re still working on it?
Yeah. I have one more year of scholarship, and I’m writing the thesis. It’s in this fine arts school in Lisbon. But I have two co-supervisors, one in Paris and one in Rome.
Is that because you know these people personally?
Well, I reached out to the Italian guy because he wrote this book called Walkscapes (2002). He’s an Italian architect, Francesco Careri, and he writes about this idea of walking as an aesthetic practice. He traces all these very Parisian 20th-century movements, like the Situationists and the surrealists. But even before that, with the Palaeolithic nomads, when they started putting signs in the landscape to work as maps.
I really like walking in the city, it’s basically one of the first things I do when I’m preparing a film. Not only do I walk in my daily life — because I don’t have a car — but when I’m preparing the film, I actually draw these maps of urban walks around certain places. It’s a way of gathering elements from the city.
So I wrote Francesco an email, basically saying that I really liked his book and if he could be my co-supervisor, and he agreed. The other one is a Portuguese teacher called Teresa Castro who works at Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle. She writes a lot. Now she has changed her focus a bit, but she used to write a lot about the relationship between cinema and cartography.
That’s interesting, also because it reminds me of your first short film, Entrecampos (above), where the brother offers to draw a map for Mariana.
Yeah, it’s curious now that I look back; it wasn’t intentional. I mean, it was intentional, but I didn’t approach it with this critical or theoretical background, because now I see very clearly that this is a film where I was really trying to learn how to do a sort of cinematic cartography — at the same time as this child was sort of trying to understand the urban space and turn it into a place of friendship and affection — her own place. That’s what I was more or less doing through cinema as well. I was learning how to film my own city. It was like a first attempt. So it’s funny to see that film nowadays from this perspective. It’s like me doing my first steps as a filmmaker alongside Mariana. The map, of course, has a central role. But I’ve always been interested in maps, even before all this theoretical framework throughout my PhD. I’ve always been interested in maps and representing space, the scales.
Yeah, and I was struck by the symbolic quality in Entrecampos, when Mariana struggles with the map that is too big for her. Is that feeling of the city being too big for your grasp something you could relate to when you were trying to make Lisbon films?
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s probably one of the main impulses: to continue the quest. There’s this very nice short story by Borges, where this king is trying to make a map of his kingdom on a scale of one to one.1“On Exactitude in Science,” 1946 It’s this utopian cartographic and cinematic objective of filming the whole reality. But one of the beautiful yet difficult things about cinema is that you have to choose a frame, a point of view. You always have the field, the champ (on-screen) and hors-champ (off-screen). And cartography, too, works with that perspective, that necessity. And so I would say that it’s always an impulse to keep making films — that the city keeps adding new layers of meaning in space that make me want to go on. So when I’m more or less stuck, it’s the city that gives me a lot of elements and feedback.
The notion of hors-champ you are talking about reminds me of an interview I had with Ben Russell and Guillaume Cailliau (the directors of Direct Action [2024]). Coming from an ethnographic background, they were talking about questions as to where the process starts. In that case, they were talking about the making of bread. Where does it start? Does it start when you knead the dough? Or does it start when you harvest the wheat? Or does it start when you plant the wheat? You could go on forever. Which makes me wonder about your ethnographic aspirations when you capture Lisbon.
Yeah, I think there’s this sense of ethnography in that the cinematic image and the photographic image; they have this capacity to inscribe reality. So it’s a document, the idea of image as a document. But that’s sort of a very… not basic idea, but it’s in the background. I like the fact that what all these films have allowed me to do is to basically try and film not only space, but time itself. Not only, of course, through the body of Francisco Melo growing up, but also the changes in the city. So, yeah, I do have this interest. It’s basically always divided between this ethnographical interest in inscribing the city’s layers in a certain place and time and, at the same time, projecting a sort of ideal city from fragments.
And to go back to your question about whether it’s a problem not to grasp the whole city in a film: No. I think the main challenge and one of the beautiful aspects of cinema is fragmentation. And the way you try to build an organic puzzle with these fragments and turn them into something organic, something that makes sense. And this is always how I try to approach the city: through this idea of fragmentation. And then there are two movements, one of you capturing and inscribing the present that will become past as time goes by, the other being your projection of a certain idea or an ideal city made out of encounters and the way the city pushes you through life, as in Nicolau’s case.
In that respect, how much do you feel like your filmmaking is bound to this specific city? Because, as far as I can tell, your films have always been in and around Lisbon. Is there something that drives you back to this?
Well, actually, my first film was a student film, but I studied in London. So I made a documentary in London called Birth of a City (2012), which, for me, works as a diptych with Death of a City (2022).2 In Death of a City, Rosas documents the demolition of an old printing workshop in the wake of ongoing gentrification processes in the center of Lisbon, clearing the way for new luxury apartments That’s where I filmed my life or my relationship with a young French painter that I met there. We lived in the same neighbourhood. So it’s basically this triangle of me, the city and this painter, also because she painted urban landscapes. The film is on YouTube, in case you want to see it.
So it started from there, because in London, I was very influenced by the psychogeographical approach of writers such as Iain Sinclair and Will Self — especially Iain Sinclair, who works in East London, which is where I lived. Books like London: City of Disappearances (2006). It’s got a lot to do with this idea of collecting urban things, sometimes trash, these pieces of paper or stories or bits of fragments of narratives of people or whatever. When you tell the story of the city through these disappearances, things that are disappearing unless you pick them up. I did the film when I was leaving London, so there was a sense of a goodbye letter to the city, this urban diary, because I have a voiceover.
But then I moved back to Lisbon. And it’s not that Lisbon is more cinematic than other cities. It’s just the place that I know best, and I need to relate somehow to either places or people. So if I don’t relate to someone, for example, at a call for an audition — someone I met on the street or public transport or a party or whatever, whose face or attitude or something I like or that attracts me or intrigues me — if I can’t relate to that person when I meet him or her, I sort of lose interest in working. And it’s the same with spaces. So it’s again this idea of not being able to grasp the whole city, even though there’s an objective inscription of space in an image as a document, so to speak.
What I am trying to do, I think, is closer to emotional cartography. It’s also influenced by memory, and memory itself is also made out of fragments. And then we sort of build organic memories through different images from different times. The places in Vida Luminosa, for example, 90% of them are places I relate to. I have a story in those places. And it’s these places that I then visit through these walks. So what I try to avoid is to have this kind of nostalgic or memorial discourse on the city or my own youth. Instead, I actually visit those places and find the life that exists now and through these characters.
I would like to film in other cities, but I would have to have some kind of long relationship with these places, even though there’s, of course, an idea of cinema. When I was talking about intriguing people, there is also the idea of intriguing places. Some scenes are a way of discovering a part of the city that I don’t know that well. Then, the cinema or the film itself is a way of creating a relationship with an area that I’ve always liked or a certain street I was intrigued by. So I try to spend time there. But for the moment, it made sense to film in Lisbon, because it’s a daily work. This idea of location scouting, for me, it’s a daily work that I do in my daily routines on my way to work or my kids’ school or whatever. I always have an eye for that and build it from there.
And how early did you know that you would revisit these characters, especially the Francisco Melo character? Did you initially know that? And since you mentioned that your filmmaking is perhaps not so much explorative as it is defined by these settings, these kinds of places and spaces you are filming, I was wondering if it happened during the shoot that Nicolau became more and more the protagonist. Because it all starts out with Mariana, but then he increasingly takes over, and in later films, it’s him with whom you’ve stuck more than with her, even though she does reappear in The Luminous Life.
Well, it wasn’t planned from the beginning. The idea of working with him again came from my desire to keep seeing him, to have this relationship with him. I had the idea for the second film, Maria do Mar (below), which was sort of parallel to Entrecampos. Maria do Mar is about this teenage boy who sort of discovers desire or sexuality or whatever you want to call it. And when I was starting to prepare the film — since the protagonist was more or less the same age (as the protagonist in Maria do Mar) — I called him and I went to see him and the guy who plays his brother. And yeah, I immediately wanted to keep working with him. And so it was from Maria do Mar onwards that I really started writing for him specifically and for certain places, because then in the other films, I tried to keep this continuity in the map that I’m drawing so that it has a geographical continuity, or makes sense geographically.
It was from the second film that I developed this idea that I’m going to keep telling this story, because for me, even though, as I was saying, cinema is a way of going back to places that I already know, there’s also an exploratory sense to it that has to do with cartography in a way of exploring certain territories that I don’t know that well. It has a lot to do with finding people for the films. The auditions and the casting are really long processes and also an excuse, especially in Vida Luminosa, to approach a certain group of people — young people, or Brazilian immigrants, or certain types by which I was intrigued. But in the case of Francisco, it started being a way of relating and being able to — again — film time. And cinema also has to do with this exploratory side and is very much linked to curiosity. At least the first impulse to film is born out of curiosity. And even cinema itself, I think, is a curious machine, the film camera a curious art.
So for me, from the beginning, this was related to childhood and adolescence. Childhood is an age where you’re also very curious towards the world and you’re learning how to deal with a certain number of things that you’ve never dealt with before. Everything is sort of new. There is this very Kiarostamian idea — he said it very well — that his films are about small human beings confronted with big problems.
Mariana is born out of this idea — this simple idea of how does a child react when she’s lost in a city and what does it become? What does it mean to be part of the city? And as I was saying before, now I see it as related to my own filmmaking process as I was beginning. And also very, very clearly now, my interest in friendships as very interesting types of relationships. And not only narratively: What makes Mariana feel at home is that she makes her first friend. And I like the fact that she keeps coming back, not as a protagonist, but as this friend that remained and is always by his side.
And I find it interesting that you’re talking about continuity, because in Maria do Mar, there’s this dinner scene when they talk about cinema and its stasis. That we replay the same film over and over, and that it cannot be changed. Of course, we can think about active viewing, and how the exact same film can change in our mind. But I was wondering if your approach to revisiting these characters opens up a sort of a way out of this entrapment, while still repeating certain elements. I was thinking of that Sesame Street shirt, for instance, that Nicolau is wearing again and again, or that he’s, at least in two films, sitting in a tree. So there are these recurring elements, while at the same time, things progress in a way. I also noticed that he starts out not necessarily being the kindest human being. Let’s say he’s a bit cheeky, but there are also some somewhat toxic elements to him as well, perhaps passed on to him by his brother or his environment as a whole. But in The Luminous Life, he seems changed and matured in a way. So overall, I was wondering about your reflections on continuity and repetition in your work.
Well, repetition is very interesting. I like to play with it even in the script when I’m writing. It’s something that probably doesn’t come through in the translation, but there are a lot of repetitions and rhymes in the lines in Portuguese. And it’s something that I’ve always liked. I don’t know where it comes from, but it’s from the first film onward, from Entrecampos, where they have these lines that sometimes are said in the beginning and then in the end, or further on. So from the start, it’s a stylistic tool that I use, that I like. It also allows me to play with humour, to have this irony and some word play, and to create a sort of intimacy with certain viewers who recognise these rhymes or these elements.
In more general terms, I think life and art are made out of precisely repetition and diversion. So it’s repetition, the pattern, and the diversion of the pattern. And so it makes sense in the sense that in our own lives, we have these recurring themes or types of people that we like or types of clothes or places that we revisit. While we keep changing, there are certain elements that change less, so to speak. And it’s also a formal way of creating these rhymes, not only in spoken language, but also from film to film: the trees and, of course, the shirts and certain things. But, for example, this thing with the trees was something that Francisco Melo was doing at the time. When we shot Maria do Mar, he was actually climbing trees — and it was something that he did, like the magic tricks.
It’s always like this with Francisco: it’s always a question of picking some of these things that he’s doing at the moment. And I think that’s why he also seems changed. In both films, Maria do Mar and Vida Luminosa, it was very clear and very beautiful to see him change during the shoot. Maria do Mar was very fast because it was like a 10-day shoot or less. He entered that house as a child and came out as a teenager. And also in Vida Luminosa, he changed during the shoot. And I think you can tell in the film. But I’m interested in these very subtle changes and subtlety in general. In my own work, I’m not interested in imposing myself. In that sense, I feel like when people ask me if I am Francisco or if I am Nicolau, I’m not Nicolau. But what I have in common with him as a director is this idea of not imposing myself and being more of a listener than an active speaker. Of course, then I have all the tools to choose from. I’m more or less the captain of the boat. But especially during the casting and the rehearsals, I’m absorbing and listening, a bit like him in the film as a character.
How do you stay friends with a child like Francisco? You first met him for this movie, but how do you stay in touch? What is it like to be a grown man and be friends with a child? How does it work? I’m really curious.
Well, first of all, I’m quite childish, even though they don’t see me as a child. I like doing stupid stuff and behaving like a child. It’s always an excuse to make funny voices. But also because I got used to it, because in more psychoanalytical terms, I have two much younger sisters who are 12 and 13 years younger than me. So when I grew up, they were children growing up. And it’s probably why, in a way, I was so interested in filming childhood, this idea of curiosity. I was very aware as a young man, at 15 or 16, that I could see them discovering language, discovering smells, tastes, the world in general, friendship, love. The way children discover those things.
For me, it was always very interesting and narratively rich. And so it was quite easy — it wasn’t an effort. I mean, I wasn’t friends with Francisco, going to the park and this kind of stuff. We didn’t meet that often. But we always had a connection. I think he really enjoyed the shoots — not only because of me, of course, but because of the crew. He was very shy when he was a child. He had a little speech impairment and was mispronouncing some words. In Entrecampos, it was a nightmare. And when I used him in Maria do Mar, I had people say: “Why, are you crazy? He can’t speak. Why are you using him?”
But Maria do Mar was built around the idea of his look; he has a very strong and particular way of looking. And so I thought of him because the whole film is based around this idea of seeing him looking at Maria do Mar and the other grown-ups. He’s observing. And I thought his strong point was his eyes or the way he looked at things. But yeah, we weren’t like close friends, but we got along, we had an immediate connection. And especially when we were preparing Maria do Mar, we spent a lot of time in this house and we were driving there and then we slept over and it was easy; we had stuff in common, we could relate and talk. It wasn’t this thing where I’m like: “Now I’m gonna have to talk to a child” or “What am I gonna talk about?” He was a curious kid as well and very funny. And I also had this experience with my sisters. So it was very natural. Of course, the more he grew up, the more we became friends. Now I can say we are friends because we go out at night and we do stuff that, of course, 15 years ago, he wasn’t doing.
I’m sure lots of people have said this to you already, but how much are you inspired by the tradition of Richard Linklater’s Before series (1995-2013) or Boyhood (2014)? I was also thinking of Truffaut and Jean-Pierre Léaud’s Antoine Doinel cycle. Have these things inspired this kind of storytelling in you?
Not really. I mean, in a way, yes, because I like these films. I like Boyhood and I like Truffaut, Jean-Pierre Léaud in particular. And even his other films with Jean Eustache. The Mother and the Whore (1973), for example, is one of my favourite films. I had seen Truffaut before I started, but at the time Boyhood came out, I had already done Maria do Mar and Entrecampos. So it wasn’t really an inspiration. I understand, of course, why people relate to that and it’s great, but they’re not really references in that sense or the reason why I started making these films in continuity. It’s because, on the one hand, I wanted to keep working with these people. And on the other hand, cinema was related to this idea of growing up and discovering the world and learning how to relate and to be yourself in the world. Vida Luminosa, in particular, is focused on the transition to adulthood. So they weren’t cinephile references. I like the films, but I haven’t thought of this really. It was just, as I told you, a way of being with Francisco and Francisca (who plays Mariana), some other people, working with the same crew. And then it was easy as well, of course, to work with the same characters. When I’m writing, Nicolau is very real for me. It’s very easy to imagine scenes for him instead of starting from scratch.
And of course, as you mentioned earlier, that you like these rhymes. There’s this assonance between your name and Nicolau, right? João and Nicolau.
But I think Nicolau was actually based on these French books, Le Petit Nicolau (Little Nicholas, René Goscinny, first instalment published 1959), these kids’ books. So I think it came from there because I really liked them. They even made a film in France from these books. I haven’t seen it. But the name comes from that character.
At Karlovy Vary, I told you that your film feels like more than one in a way, and that, with its many diversions, it reminded me of films like Los Delincuentes by Rodrigo Moreno or, I don’t know if you saw it, Lazzaro at Night (2024) by Nicolás Pérez. It starts out as this ghost story, a bit like, as I told you before, José Luis Guerín’s In the City of Sylvia (2007), but then it becomes almost a workplace comedy. And later it changes again, becomes more of a romance, at least partially. Which made me wonder how much openness is a criterion for your kind of cinema: how a film can be open, explorative, can digress and abandon its own subject. How much then is openness a criterion for your cinema?
It is a criterion. It’s also sort of a dream. It’s very hard to do what Moreno did. I really like Los Delincuentes. And I really like Mariano Llinás, with these several-hour-long films La Flor (2018) and Ordinary Stories (2008). And I love narrative. As I think I told you, I’m more a reader than a film viewer, so I really love narrative, and South American narrative in particular. It’s a criterion, but it’s very hard to accomplish. What I tried to do was to have a vast range of characters, but in a way that they work organically as a whole, and especially in a film of 100 minutes. These Argentinian examples are much longer.
Probably my favourite film — it’s also a cliché, because it was voted the best film ever many times — is The Rules of the Game (1939), from Renoir, which is a film without protagonists. I mean, there are a few protagonists, but it’s a film made out of group scenes. There’s this idea of égalité — he was a very Republican filmmaker — in the shot, and I learned a lot from that. And then it’s true that French cinema has a lot of two-shot compositions — like Linklater as well. It’s my favourite frame, these two shots of people talking. It’s something we see a lot in Renoir, and then, for example, in Robert Altman as well, he has these group films with many protagonists where you never know what’s coming next. That’s more or less what I would like to try and do in the future, but it’s very hard.
But I have a few ideas, like either a film about a birthday party, a bit like The Rules of the Game, in a country house, or on a train where you cross like different people, because you share the train with them and imagine their stories. So it’s something that I want to work with, and this was a first attempt in that sense, but I’m very interested in openness, but it’s so hard to do. In Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), for example, the protagonist dies after five or 10 minutes, no? In that time, it was revolutionary.
But I’m glad you mentioned Moreno and all because I think they’re a step ahead, and I like this idea of diversion. But at the same time, with Francisco and Nicolau, it’s a very character-based film. He’s practically in every scene of the film. The challenge, then, is how to make a film where he’s present all the time without it being only about him, but especially about the people he encounters. I remember when I was writing, that I was struck by these books by Rachel Kusk, this Outline trilogy (2014) that ends with Kudos (2018).
I have yet to read it, but I’m aware of her work.
It’s interesting because there you have the protagonist, but she’s also a listener. So, she’s basically talking about what people told her, and I think it’s a very interesting device. That was one of the starting points for the film, which I think is, again, a subtle political statement: having this male character who is a listener, he’s passive, and he’s not producing speech about women, or trying to conquer them, but he’s absorbing their knowledge and their doubts. So yeah, the idea of having many characters was also a way of trying to approach this very complex and long process of identity formation, or whatever you want to call it, in a very small feature.
Right. And since you just mentioned the women there as well, there’s this line in Entrecampos, when the brother leads the two of them to this neighbourhood of women. And upon watching this, I had this idea that they never got out of it. Throughout your films, they’ve always stayed in this neighbourhood of women, because they are, throughout, Nicolau’s main companions, right? His best friend Mariana is also a woman. Does this also have to do with your two sisters? How do you conceptualise this idea that he’s always surrounded by women?
Yeah, well, first of all, it’s the neighbourhood where I grew up. And it’s true that most streets are named after feminists from the beginning of the 20th century, like suffragettes and women leading all these feminist struggles. But yeah, I grew up surrounded by women. It’s sort of a joke in my family. I have a brother, but we’re the only ones. Our father died long ago when I was small. And so I grew up surrounded by women. I have two daughters, my brother has two daughters, we have two sisters, a mother and a stepmother, who was the widow of my father, but we get along well with her. So our family gatherings… It’s basically women. And there’s this family joke that, when my brother is not there, I’m the only man.
I don’t know how to say this in politically correct terms. I don’t want to be essentialist. It’s not that women are superior to men, but I think men have a lot to learn from women. I mean, I’ve learned a lot from female sensitivity, in very general terms. When I was talking about projecting the ideal city, it’s also an idea of projecting an ideal society where men listen to women, which I think is really a problem still.
And apparently, it’s becoming more and more a problem again. You have all these strong men, starting with Trump, of course, who “grab them by the pussy” and are proud to say it loud and clear. So I was very interested in this idea of this character who is guided by women. It’s not that they have necessarily the answer — because in The Luminous Life, they also have their own doubts. I think it’s very beautiful, from an external point of view, the friendship between men and women. The friendship between men is interesting, too, but it’s a different kind of vibe. In terms of narrative, I think it’s very inspiring. I have many women friends. And I have many male friends. But the kind of conversations we have are totally different. I’m very feminine, in a way. I sometimes like to say that I identify as a lesbian woman because I’m very feminine.
Most of my male friends, now, because they’re in a midlife crisis, they’re beginning to talk about feelings and divorce, and “what have I done with my life.” But, at least in my case, it’s often with women that I was able to have these conversations. And it’s something that I’m really interested in, you know. Life decisions and doubts and love. For example, I love talking with my women friends about their relationships, love relationships. They’re very open about it. Whereas men are much more reserved.
And many of the characters are written based on the people I got to know in the casting. And so, I happened to meet all these incredible girls, and I wanted to have them in the film. That was basically it. Some of them existed already, like Chloe, for example, the character was written. But this Italian and the Catalan girl, for example, I just met them in the casting, and I wanted to have them, so, I wrote a character for them.
I want to ask you about something I mentioned earlier to you. I’m sort of interested these days in ‘conflictless’ cinema. There are filmmakers — I don’t know if you’re familiar with Bas Devos, from Belgium —
I haven’t seen his work. But so many people have mentioned him. It’s on my list.
Yeah, or Apichatpong, of course. I feel like there are no overt conflicts in their films. There might be something structural going on, like gentrification in your film, which dispossesses or dislocates people. But it’s nothing that quite surfaces in the foreground of the story. And what I mentioned earlier about the mother character, that she has this affair. And that your impulse was not to judge her or to antagonise the protagonist against his mother. It’s rather not addressed for a couple of minutes, and then we find them in this new situation. What do you think about this notion of “conflictless cinema?” Is that something you are conscious of when you make your films?
It’s not something that I try to avoid. First of all, I’m not interested in judging my characters — not even real people, like in Death of a City. It would have been very easy to judge the French investor in that film, for example, or the ground manager on the construction site. But it’s another lesson that I learned from Jean Renoir, which is: everyone has their own reasons, which is very present again in The Rules of the Game. And it has stayed with me as a sort of mantra: “I’m not here to judge.” I don’t want to use cinema for that. I’m a judgmental person as well — like everyone else — when I read the newspaper, or with my friends or whatever. But I’m not interested in using cinema to judge. Because for me, it’s always a questioning process. So it’s a question of doubt and not having the answer. And all the films are born out of this doubt, either in fiction —
Which, of course, features in the choir scene at the beginning of the film.
Of course, it’s sort of a Greek choir that gives the motto to the whole film. I like that idea of both the Greek choir and the community sense that exists in a choir. But also in Death of a City, where I didn’t want to make a pamphlet about all the nice cafés that closed in Lisbon to become five-star hotels, or the place where I used to go that doesn’t exist anymore. On the contrary, I wanted to film what was happening to the city, but from a questioning point of view, without necessarily judging what I was filming. Even though, of course, there’s a political point of view that I assume in the film. But it’s not something that I look for consciously.
When I’m writing, I’m more interested in the long-term or the small moments that have an impact in the long-term. For example, this scene with the mother: It makes Nicolau move out of the house. It’s sort of something that pushes him to do something. So I’m more interested in what it does to him, what it makes him do, than having this violent scene of him crying with the mother and fighting, or judging the mother. It’s a fragment, and I really like to work with ellipses… That’s something that I learned a lot from Bresson: the ellipses, and how you don’t necessarily need to explain or show — again, this idea of the frame and out of frame, the hors-champ.
There are a lot of things that happen outside or behind the camera that you can approach in a subtle way. And so I’m always looking for simplicity, sort of depuration. Cutting what’s too much, staying with the bone — cut to the bone. And, to stick with the mother’s relation: all these cliché reactions wouldn’t be the bone, it would be too much meat and fat, the bone of it being what happens to him when he sees this. For me, what’s more interesting is what stays with him, the way it’s going to affect his relationship with the father, with the mother as well. Of course, he’s still seeing the mother, even though there’s no scene. More with Chloé, his point of view on love in general, than necessarily the conflict with the mother and confronting her.
Because either I had a super original idea, that this was the starting point to a new film — in the sense of openness, I could go down that route. The film would be about the mother and go somewhere else. Or it is a fact of life, something that happened among other things that are happening, and all of these little bits are going to affect his own course. And I’m interested in these small moments, the small things.
Like when, in the beginning, I was talking about inscribing the city and I mentioned Iain Sinclair and City of Disappearances: It’s like a little note that you catch from the street or a photograph or a postcard you find from a location, whatever, something that tells you a story or that you keep with you and that enriches your own life. I’m interested in these small episodes or little things that influence your own path, more than the big ones. Life itself is already very tragic, and I like tragic films as well, but for me, cinema is also a way of — that’s why I call it The Luminous Life — projecting this sort of ideal city made out of encounters, beautiful women and men talking about feelings, and climbing on trees.
Patrick Fey is a freelance critic, whose writing has appeared on Kino-Zeit, Critic.de, Filmstarts and Moviebreak.