My personal goals...
With this film, I wanted to follow Alain, a man in his early fifties, at a crossroads in search for the truth about himself, and his relationship to love.
The film touches on the definitions, forms, senses and colours of the word love. Passionate, sexual, lost, found, absent, filial, fraternal, unconditional, hidden, friendly, compelling love. A whole world of possibilities.
I wanted to give this film a unique tone, crossing space and time in three dimensions: past, present and an imaginary future inscribed in a fantastic world set in Cape Verde. That imaginary vision of time is shown as a waking dream, activated by Alain’s subconscious.
Ten years ago, outside a movie theatre in Lisbon, I met a woman I called Luisa in the film. I asked her if she was an actress. That question was the catalyst for my film. The life story of a director who wants to re-edit his life as if editing a movie...
In 2012, I shot Luisa’s character in a documentary form, unconsciously provoking what would be a near abyss, a metaphor of passions and mysteries that permeate Portuguese myths.
Some years later, those intimate archives, became the DNA of my first feature.
I re-shot that actress in the present day, confronting Luisa and her character with Alain, the man she loved and whom she fully mourned. She will meet him again free from emotion or resentment, but he is forced to question how real his memories are. Is it an illusion, fiction, a truth, a lie or alienation?
In his phantasmagoria, Alain dreams of meeting Luisa in Cape Verde. The film then introduces images of Cape Verde, that are “images of thoughts”. For me, they are a sort of condenser of thoughts and, as a consequence, is the product of a prerecorded vision to resemble the dream.
Hence, the crossing of the “images of thoughts” and the images of present-day Lisbon that set the dramaturgical rhythm and invite the audience to start questioning.
The beginning of the film urges the audience to abandon their purely rational view of time and invites them to enter a new dimension, where the story unveils to create suspense and provoke a result.
The end of the film proposes some answers, leaving the audience free not to accept them.
As a documentary filmmaker, mixing reality and dream is something that was imposed upon me. It was a compelling limitation but that I freely agreed to, and that should be seen with curiosity.
The game played by the main characters evolves to a dialogue between dream and reality. The women personify reality, and Alain chases the dream.
The choice of locations is a crucial element that creates the setting for the film and defines the real and imaginary territories. I wanted the journey of the main character to go from north to south, from Belgium to Cape Verde, via Lisbon. Ghent is the city where Alain cannot escape from his guilt and Lisbon comes as a refuge, while Cape Verde is the place where he can create a future of salvation.
While discovering Cape Verde, the place where Alain imagines Luisa lives, there’s another aspect of Portugal that the film wishes to revisit.
The archipelago of Cape Verde is part of the history of Portugal that alludes to its colonial empire. The Carnival sequence in the film reveals the creole fusion that unites, through the South Atlantic, the rivers of the African countries, Brazil and Portugal, via unshakable ties.
The fire sequence is premonitory and tragic, due to the highly awaited encounter between Alain and his lost love. The vision of Luisa dancing in an allegoric car, appears as a reference to the myth of Orpheus, an homage to the film “Black Orpheus”.
The fire sequence is also an illustration of a metaphor about the mix of cultures and rituals. In that imaginary space, a hybrid Shaman community is imbued with Christian rituals (the fire of Saint Joan), as well as Brazilian Macumba and the music and dances from Africa. It’s the symbolic moment of Alain’s purification and redemption, that will free him from his ghosts and guilt.
An important note:
“The image” and the role it plays today in our daily lives, reaching the depths of our intimacy. Alain is possessed by those images of Luisa captured seven years prior. They incite him to transgression, justifying the violation of Luisa’s privacy. In the possession of those images, Alain takes on the role of legitimate guardian and possessor of both their pasts.
The new numeric instruments that transform our lives, make us prisoners o
