Posted: 2010-01-30
Posted By: Zoë, from Santa Fe, New Mexico
Ela falou que… tudo que ela estudou, tudo que ela sabe, isso só aconteceu por que [quando ela era criança], uma outra criança levou ela pra escola.
She said that… everything that she studied, everything that she knew, all this happened because, [when she was a child,] another child carried her to school.
That’s Neuza talking. The one who did the carrying. You can see her in the trailer, so smart (like her daughter Milla) she’d have been burned at the stake as a witch (probably, infelizmente, with Milla), back in the bread-mold-bad Cotton Mather acid trip days of Salem, Massachusetts in Anno Domini 1692.
It’s enough meat for a story that one child realizes dreams because another carries both the child and her dreams. Enough troubling mass exists in that realization to make this film. If it sounds universal, it is -- and it also belongs to Neuza.
These women are funny as hell. They are that kind of people. The ones who make you pee with laughter, well up, buzz like a little precocial pea in a pod and feel your naïvete, all at once. “I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone,” Rilke wrote.
Next question: Who carries the child who carries the child? The question repeats itself in mirrors, but if a child is not carried by someone, she may be carried by something – or she may carry herself. We want to look closer, and closer again. Tem todo o mundo uma historia. (Everyone has a story.)(Neuza again.)
The individual people that occupy both the center and the fringes of this story comprise, along with the rest of us, the most prolific, crazed, vivid and terrified bird-print dance pattern of human migration that history has ever seen. Around them, in weighted sighs, hyperventilations and concealed sobs, breathe the places they live in or once lived in, and the creatures, flora and limnological wonders that belong to those places. Each moment is busy carving its ambiente into the memory.
These are the images I have been looking at for almost three weeks now. During the first week, I tried to string together the whole story without words, and almost succeeded. Words are my job, but I loved the silences I lived in for a week: a place is a place because of a sign on a window or a goat eating mangoes out of the trash. A person is a person because moon. Because glancing away. I have been repeating, re-playing, repeating and re-playing rivers, gestures, red-flowered umbrellas, and unguarded moments:
Last week my goal was to re-learn Portuguese. As I sit alone in my chair, captive to the screen for hours on end, hollering at Milla, Catiça, Afonso and Elma to slow the hell down already, I can’t understand you, some strong-backed cadence returns and I know we can do this, I know we can return the favor.
For Our Grandmothers
Posted: 2010-01-08
Posted By: Eliot, from Santa Fe, New Mexico
Neuza comforted me the evening I returned from the orelhão, having called my mom and heard that my grandmother had died. I hadn’t cried when I first heard: we all knew it was coming. But as Neuza embraced me, my mind kept returning to my mother’s shaky voice and tears, and that there seemed to be very little I could do for her in that moment, nothing I could say that would close the distance between us. That distance has become the new norm for so many people in the world today, an almost ubiquitous variable in the loss of a loved one. In some sense, the personal dislocation makes the experience of mourning someone more bearable, dulling the pain of separation. But somewhere down deeper it stops something from happening, a certain kind of processing that happens with presence. It’s not unlike the webcams that approximate physical presence so well while also seeming to grow the gap between people so much more. We’re all so much more connected to people around the world than ever before in history, and yet it can’t help but feel to me that we’re sacrificing depth for breadth. One of the problems is that the depth comes from a bunch of tiny little moments, so it’s hard to see that much of anything is being sacrificed at all.
Milla’s grandmother just passed way recently, too, with her granddaughter thousands of miles away in the United States. Milla did a great impression of her, shuffling around and sniffing, getting no greater joy than from her daily novelas. She thought the characters in the shows were real people, and who can blame her, since the shows would often directly precede reality fare like Big Brother Brasil. As I’m sure Milla does, I wish I was somewhere else again, too—back in hot and rainy Minas Gerais, providing the comfort that can only be found in an understanding, gentle embrace.
As our story comes together here over the next few months, I want to figure out how to really show what these moments mean, the strange feeling of dislocation, of a shifting paradigm full of technological sound and fury and “progress,” but sometimes missing the key ingredient of arms wrapped around bodies.
I found a handwritten note on our plastic work table later that night that said, “Sara and I dedicate this film to your grandmother and your family. We want to give you strength. We are friends and also a family.” We all talked shortly after that, back at work, and decided that it seemed appropriate to dedicate the film to all our grandmothers. Wasn’t quite sure then why this made so much sense then, but now it makes even more.
Things that Quicken the Heart
Posted: 2009-12-25
Posted By: Sara Dosa, from Oakland, California
On a late and damp London night, a close close friend showed me Sans Soleil, the 1983 poetic documentary made by French New Wave darling, Chris Marker. After only a few short images, I recognized the film as a thing of transformative beauty; a thing, that, as explained in the film itself, “quickens the heart.”
Dreaming in American is wildly different from Sans Soleil. But, I hope that upon completion, traces of Sans Soleil will be perceptible in places. Sans Soleil grapples with a central question that we are currently exploring as we transition into post-production: how do we, in the digital age, close the inevitable distance between us? How does one preserve the evocative and minute details of life in another land across tremendous time and space? In his meandering prose-poem narration that takes the form of letters from lovers, Marker articulates his sentiments:
The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black.
He wrote: I'm just back from Hokkaido, the Northern Island. Rich and hurried Japanese take the plane, others take the ferry: waiting, immobility, snatches of sleep. Curiously all of that makes me think of a past or future war: night trains, air raids, fallout shelters, small fragments of war enshrined in everyday life. He liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time. Those memories whose only function had been to leave behind nothing but memories. He wrote: I've been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me. On this trip I've tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter. At dawn we'll be in Tokyo.
He used to write me from Africa. He contrasted African time to European time, and also to Asian time. He said that in the 19th century mankind had come to terms with space, and that the great question of the 20th was the coexistence of different concepts of time. By the way, did you know that there are emus in the Île de France? He wrote me that in the Bijagós Islands it's the young girls who choose their fiancées.
He wrote me that in the suburbs of Tokyo there is a temple consecrated to cats. I wish I could convey to you the simplicity—the lack of affectation—of this couple who had come to place an inscribed wooden slat in the cat cemetery so their cat Tora would be protected. No she wasn't dead, only run away. But on the day of her death no one would know how to pray for her, how to intercede with death so that he would call her by her right name. So they had to come there, both of them, under the rain, to perform the rite that would repair the web of time where it had been broken.
He wrote me: I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?
He used to write to me: the Sahel is not only what is shown of it when it is too late; it's a land that drought seeps into like water into a leaking boat. The animals resurrected for the time of a carnival in Bissau will be petrified again, as soon as a new attack has changed the savanna into a desert. This is a state of survival that the rich countries have forgotten, with one exception—you win—Japan. My constant comings and goings are not a search for contrasts; they are a journey to the two extreme poles of survival.
He spoke to me of Sei Shonagon, a lady in waiting to Princess Sadako at the beginning of the 11th century, in the Heian period. Do we ever know where history is really made? … Shonagon had a passion for lists: the list of 'elegant things,' 'distressing things,' or even of 'things not worth doing.' One day she got the idea of drawing up a list of 'things that quicken the heart.' Not a bad criterion I realize when I'm filming; I bow to the economic miracle, but what I want to show you are the neighborhood celebrations.
All Snug In Their Beds
Posted: 2009-12-24
Posted By: Eliot, from Santa Fe, New Mexico
A couple weeks back, on a long international plane trip, I recalled our flight down to Brazil last December -- I remember having very little idea what to expect, what this adventure held in store. I’m still pretty sure that we humans were not built to travel long distances in such a short time like that. Our bodies defy the seeming efficiency with which we can move them around continents, wanting to shut down when they were accustomed to do so in the old time zone. But we’re actually incredibly adaptable creatures, and we seem to just continue testing the limits of how adaptable we are.
In the final days of December last year, Milla, Sara and I were running around like crazy people; it was getting hotter and wetter, and Christmas was approaching in Resplendor, and we were intent on nailing down subjects with compelling stories who would allow us to invade their lives for a few months. We had a number of leads and were beginning to make lists of all the scenes we knew we wanted from them to tell the story. We transferred the scenes from the lists onto note cards and sections of note cards and taped them up to the walls in the “work” room of our sparse apartment.
Already been in production for a few weeks, we were trying to figure out exactly what role Christmas would play in the film: the holiday had been one of the reasons we were in Brazil from December through January, and why in fact we wouldn’t be spending it with our own families for the first time in our lives. At this time of year more than most any other, we realize if our loved ones are thousands of miles away. We also believed the holiday season could be an accessible and natural way of entering some of our key themes, the loss of community and family connections to materialism. In the end, we didn’t film too much with any particular subject on Christmas eve or the following day. And we came to see that was just fine. Christmas will still have a presence in our story, but as the hours passed on the twenty-fourth and we clearly were not going to be invited into any one of our subjects’ homes to film them celebrating, I came to understand that a that kind of scene would be much like taking hammer to our audience’s heads, and that addressing the issues more subtly and obliquely would provide a richer, more complex experience.
Over the course of production, we were lucky enough to realize that, in our own ways, we were having direct experiences with some of the conditions and circumstances we are trying to expose in the film. One of our main goals in making this film is to pursue what it means for people to adapt to the diverse kinds of separation that accompany migration. So what did we do to deal with the saudades that arrived in waves last Christmas eve? As we prepared to go to bed and deny our loneliness, Neuza insisted we bring our mattresses downstairs from our apartment to Milla’s sister Gê’s place, where Neuza and Gê slept, and the five of us -- a couple homesick Americans, a clinically depressed widow, and her grown daughters struggling to make it in the world -- became a funny, impromptu family of our own, and we slipped into unconsciousness as fuzzy images of the Pope conducted midnight mass and a ceiling fan hummed overhead.
Bringing Back the Sun
Posted: 2009-12-21
Posted By: Zoë, from Santa Fe, New Mexico
I come home
She lifted up her wings
I know that this must be the place
— Talking Heads, “Naïve Melody”
Tonight, here in the Northern Hemisphere, is the longest night of the year. Tomorrow, thankfully, the light begins to return.
As if in unconscious accord with the sun, we human satellites shoot about in planes, trains and cars, trying to get to that doorway, that warm kitchen, that constellation of faces that means home. So much movement, on such a still, dark night.
Some dear friends of mine observe this turning of the season by dancing all night in a field near the banks of the Rio Grande. As dancers tumble in and out of the circle, in bursts of fresh inspiration and exhaustion, at least one drum must continue the work of heralding the sun. The sun, like anyone, needs encouragement.
Meanwhile, down south, a wet heat glistens in the air, making individual halos around the light-festooned houses of Minas Gerais, whose steps and doorways are dressed up in glowing plastic Santas, fake fir wreaths and silver tinsel.
Mineiros are great at throwing parties, and they know how to celebrate Christmas like nobody’s business. But for all the lights and noise and big boxes of presents arriving from the U.S., it seems that everyone is somehow inert, suspended in time, waiting for a message from half the world away, the place where real fir trees grow.
You can wait, this way, for the voice of someone you love, all night. Until it finally comes, refracted, disembodied, nothing seems complete, and afterward your orbit is still erratic, confused, as if you’re not sure whether you dreamed the sunrise or it actually happened.
Musings from the Realm of the Magically Real
Posted: 2009-12-18
Posted By: Sara Dosa, from Oakland, California
“The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”
This quotation is found on the first page of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a favorite book of mine, whose whismy, poetry and magical realism inspired in me a new way of viewing. To me, this phrase implied a boundless and galloping freedom; a limitless of mind unbridled from language. The world, then, lacked names: it lacked categories and precise definition. Meaning, therefore, was thrust wide open to interpretation.
Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," romanticizes a similar sentiment. Borges writes about the fictional utopia of Tlön, a civilization where nothing is linear or permanent, that epitomizes the fleeting and the phenomenological. He writes:
There are no nouns in the hypothetical Ursprache of Tlön…Nouns are formed by an accumulation of adjectives. One does not say moon; one says airy-clear over dark-round or orange-faint-of-sky or some other accumulation. In the chosen example, the mass of adjectives corresponds to a real object. The happening is completely fortuitous.
In his baroque way, Borges means to say “anything could happen.” Meaning exists unhinged, entirely dynamic; amorphous. These themes reoccur in fiction hailing from the realm of the magically real: themes of “fortuitous happenings” that contain no conventional rationality, but reveal sensational universes breathing just beneath the skin of quotidian life.
We want out film to play in language in this way—not just of words, but of imagery: to create a visual lexicon hinting a unique, little known and cohesive world. And, through this, to precipitate transformation. Magical realism’s devices felt apt for this aesthetic.
I am often left, though, with the weight of a pressing question. How can this playfulness be represented when language can simultaneously feel monolithic? Words are sharp and exclusive. Down from the lofty worlds of magical realism, there is a hard solid geometry to language: it bars and blocks and renders the un-tongued invisible; it can nullify existence.
Always Sleeping Here
Posted: 2009-12-14
Posted By: Zoë, from Santa Fe, New Mexico
Considering what question is at the heart of this film, the first that came to me was, "What is the real world?" Now the task, according to the folks who give out money to filmmakers, lies in answering this or some other single burning-core of a question. But I wonder what question is truly worth being asked by art that is answerable at all, and protest that each answer to an important question is instantaneous only, and a lie one moment later.
Always Sleeping Here
What is the real world?
Alone infinitesimal when snow
lingers in the wrinkles of your coat,
you are not what made you. And something else
when you’re walking down the tracks, the vultures’ highway,
crouching to map a mango sprout’s speed.
Don’t cry that your photographs cannot see or hear you
even when you bang all the pots and pans to get their attention,
even as you die. You know the real world is an ache
whose scaffolding is forgetting every book
the moment it falls to the floor.
I’d rather live as my shred—someone else’s hands on my face—
than be this slow monday florida polar bear.
A new real world for each new grief, then,
each grief a new wind’s cabin boy.
In the real world we don’t get to keep
the child’s braid always in the same drawer. Do you know what it means / to miss New Orleans / and miss it each night and day
I hear the real world is making more ocean, a beautiful
configuration of thirst and exhaustion.
Cry. Drive? Cry.
excerpt from Ashes and Seeds / Cinzas e Sementes
Posted: 2009-12-07
Posted By: Zoë, from Santa Fe, New Mexico
I wrote Ashes and Seeds / Cinzas e Sementes after returning from Brazil in the winter of 2006. It became a genesis point for our film. Here's an excerpt from the beginning of the piece:
It is impossible for me to feel anything but love for trains— that is, what they signify besides savage eruptions of violence and all that is sacrificed to bulbous dinnertime railroad barons. The train is the thing that flies away to places you’ve never been. It’s longer and leaner and tougher than you. You’re left with the flattened coin, or you pay passage, or you stow away.
Every place I have lived has been within the sound of trains. Here mango trees sprout between railroad ties. Throw a seed and it will grow. I come from a place of ice and pine and marvel at the two percent of the once Mata Atlantica that still lives in this region. Like an infant owl dozing in flowering freesia. Only seven percent of this mata left in the country. A coastal rainforest that the Portuguese, with the enforced assistance of a greater number of African slaves than any other country in the world ever bought, gradually denuded of such beings as the red-fleshed pau-brasil, hundreds of species of hummingbird, and, not least, the indigenous Tupi people.
Watch it passing as if on a train in the dark.
If you know what once lived here, if you have heard of the numerous ex-species of monkey and butterfly and fig and liana, the magnificent nose-shaped granite hills of Minas Gerais (literally, General Mines) are heavy with absence. Behind the white bodies of elegantly dewlapped cows stand the absent trees: innumerable tall ghosts.
Threads
Posted: 2009-12-02
Posted By: Sara Dosa, from San Francisco, California
My mother and I are close. So close that, when we are apart, we enact a series of odd rituals to dissolve the weight of our distance. Foremost, is the “hand-rub.” My mother once explained that an invisible thread ran from my palm to her palm. Whenever I felt lonely, I could rub the soft pad of my hand and feel her presence. It worked every time.
We began to pair the “hand-rub” with the “moon-gaze.” We decided that the moon was a window, a type of portal, made for viewing one another. If I looked at the moon the same time she did, it was as if we were looking straight on through to each other on the other side.
Next came the hummingbirds. The colorful sprites, whose habitat my mother cultivated in her garden, became our messengers. I would see a beijaflor in Travessia and know that she had sent me love from the Oakland hills.
I remember one rainy late afternoon. Milla, Eliot and I were returning from Santa Aninha, a small farming outpost nestled in the giant purple boulders of rural Minas Gerais. Our taxi was momentarily stuck in the red-viscous mud that was once our dirt road. I pressed my face up to the window as the rain continued to fall. Suddenly, a flash of amber darted through a grove of banana trees, disappearing somewhere behind the massive leaves. I reached for my hand and pressed my palm. It was 5:06pm. Right then, I sensed my mother watching a hummingbird at home back in California. Later that evening, via skype, I found out that she had! At 11:00am PST, she told me that she observed a hummingbird drinking from pink salvias; she was thinking of me too.
These things are silly things. But they are tools that close the distance. And more, they are symbols and signs. I do not see my mother everyday, but I see her in things; the world around me is imbued with her presence. I have felt a sharp and wrenching loneliness in my travels; the kind where loneliness ceases to be a word and feels more like a contraption. I have felt ripped away from those I loved and longed for during their most challenging and vulnerable times. The sight of a hummingbird, an early moonrise, the touch of a hand, each placate impending alienation; they are my threads that weave a sense of connection around me.
The film, in some ways, is an exploration of such feelings. We animate in the presence of Brazil in the environs of Boston; we give expression to the symbols that help our characters overcome their own saudades. And through this, we hope to depict an interconnected world.
Neuza, Milla’s mother, sings Roberto Carlos ballads while hand-washing laundry below the hummingbird feeder on her porch. She used to spy on me as I peered timidly at the feeder, eager to catch a glimpse of a beijaflor kissing its florescent plastic flowers. In broken Portuguese, I tried to explain what that meant to me. And, in Neuza’s wild and mischievous way, she laughed and laughed. But she also smiled. She said, when Milla arrives in the US, she will feed the beijaflor and pretend the little bird is Milla; they will be her symbols too.
Posted: 2009-11-30
Posted By: Zoë, from Santa Fe, New Mexico
"In the desert"
from The Black Riders
by Stephen Crane (1871-1900)
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: “Is it good, friend,”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”
