The conference room was almost empty for Linha de Passe, a Brazilian film directed by Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas that explores the relationships between four who share a mother, but each have a different, missing father. “The boys search for father figures among other people within the film,” explained Thomas, “[and] they find it within themselves… There isn’t a father, but there are fathers.” The general lack of fathers in the film was inspired by the absence of the father in Brazil more broadly, a country which Thomas described as “dramatically orphaned." I wasn't able to see the film, but the conference was really interesting. Staking out has allowed me to listen to directors explain their different motives for filmmaking; how passionately they speak about their work is inspiring.
The directors spent the bulk of the conference discussing their inspirations, and how they wanted to portray paternal absenteeism prevalent in Brazil. Salles cited the statistic that almost 30% of Brazilian homes are without fathers, and traced this absence to the colonization of Brazil, when the Portuguese arrived, named the country, and went back to Spain. “Brazil can be explained by the chronic absence of fathers,” he said, and so can the film.
Salles wants to differentiate his work from the films that come out of Brazil in which characters use violence to resolve their problems (City of God, etc), and sought to create a more positive portrait of a people who do not resort to murder and gang warfare. “We wanted to make a film that shows that violence is turned down as an option… about people who really do achieve redemption.”
To make the film as true a portrait of Brazil as possible, he and Daniela visited Sao Paulo and explored its suburbs to get a more rounded perception of the city. “Sao Paulo was born with the basic storyline of the film as a sixth character in the film,” explained Thomas. "It has no escape, no sense of redemption… [It’s sort of a] city at the end of the world.” They wrote about the places they visited, and included real people in the film. Italian neorealism was a big influence, and the inspiration behind their use of non-professional actors and real people as extras. “There were no extras in this film,” Salles claims, “the people in the church were people in a church. The football players were real football players.” The influence that artists Rossellini adn Eistenstein have on him stems from his admiration of the way they changed cinema; he said that “all the guys who created an aesthetic revolution" are at the heart of Brazilian film, and Cinema Novo was a huge influence on Linha de Passe.
On whether he would collaborate with another director again: "the cinema is a collective venture... I think it would be very difficult to [co-direct] on a permanent basis. After solo films it is good to have different people contributing to the film. It's very inspirational, and [Linha de Passe] is stronger than what I'd do by myself."
More info about the film can be found here and in the issue of the Saint after the film comes out in the UK, on September 26th.
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