TRIBECA DIRECTOR INTERVIEW: PAULA GAITAN, DAYS IN SINTRA

Screening Times: Apr 27th, 8:30pm (Village East), Apr 29th, 3:30pm (AMC Village VII), Apr 30th, 1:30pm (19th St. AMC), May 4th, 7:45pm (19th St. AMC)

Brazilian filmmaker Paula Gaitan’s ghostly part memoir, part experimental doc Days In Sintra chronicles her return to Sintra, Portugal, where she once lived in exile with her husband, famed Brazilian director Glauber Rocha (1938-1981), a notable figure in Brazil’s Cinema Novo movement of the 1960′s.

Filmmaker: At what point following your husbands death did you begin to ruminate about this film?

Gaitan: 25 years later. I have realized many films and documentaries before carrying out Days in Sintra. I thought it was important to have this distance from the historical moment so that it could become reminiscence, forgetfulness, poetry, art.

Filmmaker: What initially provoked you to return to Portugal?

Gaitan: The possibility to create a movie with new perceptions and to see in what way the emotions would transit through the labyrinths of the unconscious.

Filmmaker: Have your children seen the film? What do they think of it?

Gaitan: They have just seen the film after it was ready, in an opening session of the Rio de Janeiro’s Festival, with five hundred people in the room. They got visibly moved, as the whole audience did… it was a special night.

Filmmaker: What, if anything, surprised you about the film as you constructed the movie in the editing room?

Gaitan: This film is a film of composition, of language construction in the edition room, and also a kind of craftwork film, as if it was being weaving images, ideas. I did the photography in super 8, in 1981, and also in my returning to Portugal in 2007. The composition was happening slowly, in an impressionist way, by associations of ideas, composition of memory layers, involuntary memory. It was a discovery of a memory’s topography.

Filmmaker: How has the film been received in Brazil? Como o filme foi recebido no Brazil?

Gaitan: It was not commercially launched yet, but will happen yet in this year. In the critics sessions it was well received, and in the Rio’s Festival and in Sao Paulo’s Exhibition the audience got really amazed for it was not a journalistic documentary, but a reflexive documentary, of an inner travel, in first person, that evokes Glauber. The audience really liked it.

Filmmaker: If you could make this picture again, what would you do differently?

Gaitan: Nothing, perhaps I would create a longer version. This film has the rhythm of breathing. It is a sensorial movie.

What’s next for you?
I have just accomplished a short film, Monsanto. I am preparing a film sequence of a fiction movie, Sobre a Neblina, to be realized in co-production with Argentina, and also preparing a short film about the work of the poet Marcio-Andre, entitled Intradoxos.