catalogue 2007 en .pdf - Festival international du documentaire de ...

MICHEL TREGANRÉTROSPECTIVE PEDRO COSTAAfter “In Vanda’s Room” (2000), why did you make another film in the Fontainhasneighbourhood?I wanted to work with the same people again, Vanda and the young people who cameto her room. Their lives had changed, the fiction was there. Vanda always says that shehas done stupid things and that before she was like this or like that. When she saysthat, we are in fiction and at the same time not, because the previous film exists.Everybody here tells something about the present and they stage themselves. The boywho is dying in the hospital: it’s a little fiction, he is very well in reality. He tells aboutwhat happened in Vanda’s room: I was very poor, I was begging, my father haddisappeared, and mother wasn’t around. He had a text, like everybody. It’s a fiction film.(...) Ventura says a beautiful phrase, that comes from Cape Verde: “In the houses ofthe dead, there is always much to see.” He uses a Portuguese word that can designateboth the dead, and the dispossessed, the very poor, phantoms or zombies. Venturaimagines things that happen on these calcinated walls blackened by damp. Then, a bitunconsciously, the film almost ends in a white house that has this colour because it hasbeen calcinated. We imagine there is a fire, and all is black, figures appear. The newneighbourhood is much more violent than the old one, there’s no history, no life, theinhabitants of the old neighbourhood don’t know how to live there. Technically, it poseda problem, because it was evidently more comfortable in the old places. I was used totheir colours. There was more mystery, indirect light, shadows and cinematic life. It isdifferent in the new neighbourhood. We all asked ourselves the same question. Me:“How am I going live in this film with those walls?” Them: “How are we going to livethere?”(...) I have liked filming inside for a long time. Video allows certain things and not others.It’s necessary to waste time, we talk before the scenes, we talk for days and days.At a certain moment we film, and it’s part of the same thing, there is no clap, themovement is the same. It’s very considered, it’s a way of creating a memory, of ensuringthat the text belongs so much in these rooms that it could be said every night, everymonth, every year, every day perhaps a bit better. We improve things, the actors select,they eliminate all that is unnecessary and the scene gets stronger. Does it come fromthe practice of the Straub film? I don’t know, it comes from that, but also from previousthings. Here, I was more into the plastic aspect, I dared to do things that I didn’t do inVanda. It was a room and that was enough. It is also a bit of a miracle that the filmworks like that. Vanda was made thanks to the desire for it to be made, that it absolutelyhad to be filmed. That desire was not only mine, but also that of Vanda, her sister, andthe others. For this movie, there was another type of faith, if one can say that. Thebelief that it is possible to tell things in the cinema like we did before. The idea of a filmthat comes from a certain realism but also from B-movies, which is a bit contradictory:Straub and Tourneur, the cinema of horror and the New Wave.Emmanuel Burdeau and Thierry Lounas, interview with Pedro Costa, “Mon regard etcelui des acteurs étaient le même”, Cahiers n° 619.140