SING SONGS

my last film
CANTAR CANTIGAS / SING SONGS
50' - documentary

was selected for DOCLISBOA 2006
4th Lisbon International Documentary Film Festival, 20-29 October

synopsis
Trás-os-montes, a poor region in the north of Portugal. 2 trips, one on the summer, another on the winter time, searching for people and songs. Bruno, 8 years-old ‘sings with the tapes’. Deolinda ‘walks with the cows’ and show us the village cemetery that ‘has a lot to see’. Ti Ana, with 90 years-old, sing songs by the fire with the neighbors who ask ‘sing another one’. Oral tradition songs, learned from her mother and grand-mother, sang in ‘mirandes’ a local dialect. The songs tell us tragic stories that might remind of Shakespeare.

You can also check the text TIME OF CHANGES

where I talk about what it means to me to accomplish this film.

Here it is another text I wrote by then, in 1999, in my trip journal, I just found it and I like it. In some way it talks about the general feeling that pushed me to do the film and my understanding of the place and people there.

Land’s weight
Trás-os-montes, October 1999

The Nature is as beautiful as cruel. The land’s weight falls down on men of this cold land. Hard land, land rock, barren land, only food hope, only stream bed of death. The land leaves wet the bones, its smell penetrates in the hands and everywhere it smells potatoes, that cold humid odor that pleases and gnaws. The potato eaters walk around with their bending bodies and tough walk for cause of the weight of the land, the work to take off the bread of the quiet ground. It delays very much until we sight a house threaded in the landscape, constructed with the same rock of the land; dark rock, accustomed to the sacrifice and madness, the violence and the illness, the cry and the death. In this place the joys depend on the land, the frost, the rain in the good time, on the arrival of somebody, someone who has left and comes back to their land, because is their land. The land frees and is jail, poor arrest that compels to want to leave. Men and women leave voluntarily; abandon with homesickness its land courageously, advancing in the ravine for a dog world, complex, but full of faiths and hopes. The ones that are still here are convicted to the direful solitude of sleeping in abandoned villages, to wait, to receive from the land and to die in the land.

TIME OF CHANGES

A long time has passed since I wrote in this blog the last time. I went to Portugal in May and now it is already September. Wow, time fly! I feel I needed this time. It is also necessary to let things happen inside, without the pushing of telling, writing about it. This summer was a time for changes. I was not expecting to stay in America for the summer, I had applied for a grant to go to Tokyo to be working in an artist residence where I had already an exhibition booked. But the grant never came and the answer was given too late to change my plans. I believed so much I would go to Tokyo that I forgot to make a plan B, I was naive. Like that I was forced to stay in America with just a little money creating a tough situation for myself. As a result I kept working in the humid and hot Philadelphia, trying to be as much as possible in air conditioning environments so my brain could keep working. At Tech center the air was so cold that was also unbearable and the chock of extreme temperatures was uncomfortable. Anywhere I was able to find a place where I could feel just simply good, normal, healthy. Too much time in my computer, feeling kind of addicted to it. At the same time, things at home started to be difficult as well. My roommate, a Greek bio-genetic scientist who decided to find the perfect man on the internet in order to get a child after she turned 41, was emotionally instable, divided between America and Greece, oscillating between euphoric and depressive periods. She started to be progressively more and more depressed and simultaneously aggressive, creating a terrible energy field which in conjunction with the heat waves, created the urgency to be away of my own place, running from home in the morning without the will to go back. It was interesting to notice how space reflects inner problems. She wanted to be alone, so she would spread all her stuff everywhere in the house, talking on the phone with speakers on for hours, with the Greek TV on in the kitchen… Even if the house was huge, there was not a single place where I could feel at home. The only one would be my room, but placed on the 3rd floor it was so hot that simply it was impossible to be there. Once again the feeling of being homeless. I felt tired. The only solution was to work as much as I could no matters where. Tech center, coffee shops, parks…

I started a book based on this blog, extending it with new texts, new visuals, creating the design - it’s almost ready now! It will be self-published soon, On Demand and anyone would be able to buy it on the internet. Giving an order and a new look for the random texts I wrote in the blog since I am in America helped me to have a sharper feeling of my experience getting, as a result, a better understanding of myself.

I also made the editing of a documentary I shot a long time ago (1999) in the north of Portugal and just now could finish. I always thought I would come back there one day and shoot more. What I shot by then should be just a first approach, a first step on my research, but I never went back there. It is a project that I was dedicated and the sensation of letting it unfinished was giving me a strange feeling. So I decided to look at the footage I had in a different perspective, trying not to think about my first ideas, what I wanted to do, but just watch what was actually there. I was surprised how things made sense, my affection for the persons I was shooting and the respect I felt for those were there in the image and things had a inner flow, that seemed so natural to me. It was the first time I felt my images were so clear, sharp, without an artificial poetic imposed by my perspective, everything was right inside.

The conclusion of my script ‘Mobile’ (which I feel very close) gives me good feelings. It is a long term project, a complex one and I’m happy to feel that’s almost done – at least the script, of course. Currently I am writing it in Portuguese. It’s an interesting little side story the one of my writing languages. For this script I started in Portuguese, then I was translating it into English (really bad English by then) so I could work at Scrip&Pitch workshops and with my advisor Jeff Rush. Then I started to write just in English, but when I had to submit it in Portugal in order to try to get a fund, a professional translator did the translation to Portuguese. Then I had to revise it, particularly the dialogues, because each language has its own rhythm and expressions. As I had a Portuguese version and I was feeling I was writing more freely in Portuguese I kept writing in Portuguese. Soon I’ll have another professional translator to put it to English again…

At the same time I could use the summer to put together the texts for my website, which is very important to make now. It is like everything I did in the last 11 years is making sense together. It is a good feeling. The text is done and I am now starting to learn Dreamweaver and Flash so I can do it by myself. Until now that learning experience has been just a big frustration but I hope soon things will be better… This knowledge will also be used on some new projects on Interactive Narratives which will give me the possibility to experiment some ideas that I believe can be significant to my study about possible futures for cinema and creative independence, as well as a way to open widely my work.
(For more info about those this, check http://holonfilmlab.blogspot.com where I’ll start to post soon. My idea is to create a LAB for research and producing new projects)

Last semester I had classes in Media Arts, this semester I’ll have Interactive Narratives. With Physical Computing I could not understand clearly or decide what I could do with it, how I could use interactivity in a meanful way with an artist approach that could make any sense in itself and in the context of my work.

Now I feel I can find my path in this new world of images and possibilities. I am interested on the creation of 2 different projects / ideas (maybe they are almost opposite): 1) NARRATIVES FOR ONE (not for a public, but for an individual user); 2) PERFORMATIVE CINEMA - one can call it VJ but I believe there are many opportunities to explore and experiment new narrative forms by the process of editing a film live in a performance context in real-time on the presence of the public. How to do it I don’t know yet… I am still on the first step of research and trying to learn software which I can not avoid.

Nevertheless I discovered also this summer that definitely I am not a cyborg, I am a very flesh and blood person, I am not a tech person, I need technology for my work but I need more than that. I don’t get along very well with computers. I would be a very unhappy cyborg with back pain and low energy :)

In August I decided to go to Canada, leaving my computer behind. Through traveling by land, by bus (almost 16 hours from Philadelphia to Toronto), feeling the distance and the landscape I could find my ground again. Being close to the Nature is important to me, it is essential; I needed to leave the city to understand that. I can not live without the Nature. It is my inspiration, a model of Change. And I need to feel close to it so I can feel close to myself. Since I am in America for some reason I was feeling detached from my body, rootless, without being able even to exercise myself. After this trip I found myself again, I moved into a new house, I got a bike, I am working at the computer still but with a different attitude. I am traveling in the city, letting the wind touch my face, going to the river, the woods, looking at the sky, the sun set, the passage of the clouds… finding a way to balance my days, myself. Even if I don’t have my ocean with its flow and tides, I can now find them in the river, which is what I have here and now.