Pedro Severien, ALL THE COLORS OF THE NIGHT - Narrative Competition
Tell us about your film, but not in a plot-centric way, please…
On the construction of All the Colors of the Night: Urban environments have histories of violence that are told with a lot of property in an oral universe, but that are not factual, you don't have full access to the information, it is almost immaterial. These cases are investigated without documentation. This greatly stirred my imagination, both for good and for evil. There is also a certain logic, a construction of a complex imaginary of violence. I realized that this was a dimension that interested me and I spent some time investigating this in short films and in All the Colors of the Night. I understood that for the construction of the film I had to deal with this essence, which is to tell a story in a subjective perspective.
The film does not attempt to clarify the case, it builds a kind of puzzle from versions that are always incomplete, that are very specifically connected to those who tell it. I wanted to invite the viewer to enter the mind of another person and experience these images as a mental flow of the character who tells the story.
Also, throughout the film, I was looking for a combination of different forms of storytelling. I had a lot of interest in this oral version of things, so the monologue. I had no interest in building a panel of social reality for Brazil. It is much more about the accumulation of this imaginary of violence. I think the imagination is closely linked to integration and rejection of memory, it is something always fluid, which never stops. This way I thought it was natural to wonder into the fantastic, into a place where the resolution is again immaterial, does not carry a physical resolution of life.
On the dynamics with the cast: To build the atmosphere, there is an aspect of complicity, a kind of pact. What interested me and I wanted to share with the cast was not necessarily a narrative that would account for a certain topic, but try to make the suffering of these emotions, these disaffections, to manifest. I had a lot of interest in something that could really happen in the scene, not necessarily a narrative in the classic sense, but an expression of something internalized, of a disoriented emotional universe. The main character, Iris, is in a spiral of disorientation. The film revolves around her with these various stories shared by the other characters. They are orbiting around her in the physical sense as to the narrative in a conceptual sense, like a game of emotions, traumas, pictures that are circulating in her head. The film is an invitation for the viewer to play this game.
Share with us a pivotal cinema related experience or moment for you
My initial film education happened in video rental shops. I used to spend my afternoons after school, inside these stores talking to the clerks and other film addicts. One day I noticed a weird video cover art, which had a lamb drawn on it. And the title did not connect with that image. It was The Exterminating Angel by Luis Buñuel. I took the VHS tape home and watched it alone. I felt a very specific kind of dislocation of reality. My perception of things changed right at that moment.
Why Slamdance?
I've worked with the constraints of low budget filmmaking in a way that I use these limitations creatively. In a way, I find this scarcity of resources very stimulating, because I use it to find narrative solutions by investigating film language. Some of the films that I admire the most have been built within these restrictions of budget and are extermely free in their imagination. I feel that this is what Slamdance values - the freedom to create within these restrictions.
Your essential Park City survival kit:
I've never been to Park City so I'll take my usual survival kit: at least two books (one on filmmaking and a piece of literature) and lots of music (Chico Science & Nação Zumbi, Mundo Livre S/A, Jorge Ben, Leonard Cohen, Velvet Uderground...). Now I'm reading, "Liberty, liberty" by Millôr Fernandes and Flavio Rangel, and "The Cinema Experience", selected essays organized by Ismail Xavier.
