Érica Sarmet's A Wild Patience Has Taken Me Here is now showing exclusively on MUBI in most countries starting February 9, 2023, in the series Brief Encounters.
A Wild Patience Has Taken Me Here is a film about desire. Lesbian desire, of course, but also the desire for belonging, for serendipity, for freer and lighter relations, for a never-ending past and those who inhabit it, and for a more welcoming future in which we hope not only to be, but to be with. It is also, as it could not be otherwise, a film about my own personal desires.
I knew I had a lot to say about lesbian figuration in Brazilian cinema, but as hard as I tried, I couldn't express it in words alone. I needed images that would help me invite people to feel what I felt (or as close to it as possible). That's why I decided to make a film—there is no better invitation to sensations. If you haven't seen it yet, please go watch it! And then come back here for this conversation.
I started imagining A Wild Patience in my head about six years ago. For this, I had some units of desire: I knew it would be about lesbian bonding, but I didn't want to make yet another work that equates queerness with youth. I also didn't want to reinforce the cliché of romantic, monogamous love that predominates in most films and shows about lesbians. One image that instigated me deeply was the figure of the fifty-something-year-old protagonist. I remember thinking I had never seen a film starring a lesbian in this age bracket (and by that I don't mean it doesn't exist, just that I haven't seen it) in which you are no longer young, but also not old enough to be an elderly person. As in adolescence, you are kind of in-between, and the in-betweens can be great points of contact.
At that time I lived in Rio de Janeiro and paid my bills working as the producer of the two main sapphic parties in the city. What I loved most about it was the powerful networks of affection and partnerships that would form in those spaces. I wanted the film to archive the joys of that time, our strong sense of community, and the intensity of bodies in motion that only a good party can offer. Unfortunately, older women were rarely seen. So in the process of creating the script, I turned to some of my dearest lesbian reference points, including the Brazilian singer-songwriter, writer, and activist Vange Leonel. I read every one of her books I could find, and one in particular, Balada para as meninas perdidas (Ballad for the Lost Girls, from 2003), made me see it could be possible to merge those two worlds. I started to really like the idea of promoting an encounter between two generations and what could come out of it, and from that moment on, there could be only one name for the lead character: Vange, riding her motorcycle back to life, heading towards us.
I sought out references and quotations to pay homage to queer artists and activists who contributed to the construction of my worldview, and to who I am as a person and artist. Vange is accompanied by a fabulous team formed by Adrienne Rich, Brazilian activist Neusa das Dores Pereira, Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, Monique Wittig, Cheryl Clarke, Lizzie Borden, Teresa de Lauretis, Rose Troche, and many others. For this reason, another very strong unit of desire was the archival footage. I knew from the beginning that the photographs had to enter somewhere, images that I didn't even know existed, or where they might be found, or how they might look, but I knew they needed to be there next to the new memories we were creating. Brazilian film curator Carol Almeida defined my film as a "lesbian metacinema" due to its gestures regarding the archives and lesbian film history, especially in its allusion to Barbara Hammer. I appreciated that remark of hers very much because Hammer was and is indeed a great inspiration to me ever since I came across her work, and because a concept that guided this project since development was Ann Cvetkovich's "archive of feelings." In her book, she states that documentary films can be an archive of feelings for the LGBTQIA+ community because they carry images that deal directly with feelings like love, happiness and trauma, and for that they are often rejected by official archives. How can we preserve these memories that are of no interest to official institutions? What can we do with all these photos and videos that are rotting in people's homes, their little treasures? We can eternalize them in film.
A Wild Patience is an archive of feelings not only because it brings these unseen images from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, but also because the images we produced are a record of our time, our lives, and the encounters made possible by the making of this film. It has given rise to many friendships, romances, some breakups as well, and a lot of transformations. The experience is very different when the crew is emotionally attached to a project, and it's this collective affective dimension that resonates onscreen. I was fortunate to have a powerful cast who did not know each other before filming, but who came to love one another. In casting, I had only one requirement: all the cast members had to be queer.
The first person to enter the cast was Bruna. She's a very bright and talented actress, with an incredible domain over her body and its relationship to the camera. It took quite a while before I could find the person who would play Vange. Throughout the process I realized this wouldn't be an easy task; after all, I was looking for actresses who were young in the ’80s. It's a generation still very much haunted by the prejudice and violence they experienced or witnessed others going through. "I wonder if there exists such things as happy lesbians? Because if they do, I want to know what it is like," wrote Ana Cristina Cesar once. After a frustrated search, Bruna came up with the idea of Zélia, who is a very renowned singer in Brazil, but who had never acted in a film before. To my surprise and joy, Zélia is someone who likes to face new challenges. She accepted the invitation and there we saw the birth of an excellent actress, focused, dedicated, and with a lot of care and delicacy, like everything Zélia does. Next, we made a small cast selection, and in this process we found Camila Rocha and Lorre Motta. Camila is a very intelligent actress, attentive and cheerful, with a dance background that gives her a tremendous body awareness and sensibility. Lorre is a gifted young nonbinary trans actor, very smart and witty, openly bisexual. Closing the cast, my friend and great work partner Clarissa Ribeiro took on the role of Granado, because it had been written based on her, so there was no one better to play it. We did one month of rehearsals, which is pretty unusual for a short film in Brazil, with the incredible support of Sol Miranda (star of Rule 34, winner of last year's Golden Leopard) in the casting preparation, and Marília Nunes in body preparation for the sex scene.
This scene was my main concern, certainly for the comfort and well-being of the actors, but also because I knew that image's strength and how it could—and did—impact people in different manners. It was a very collaborative creation. When I understood the scene wasn't going to work out as I had written it, I rethought it completely from scratch, along with Cris Lyra, our DP, and Martim Charret, our production designer. This film made me understand that lesbian/queer desire is uncapturable. It doesn't matter who is filming or how; it will always be an idealization of that person or group of people surrounding that concept. If reality is impossible, why should I be looking for it? I chose the path of artifice then, which has always seemed more interesting. I also set a challenge for myself: filming a sex scene without resorting to the codes of pornography that I knew so well, having studied the field academically for ten years. For this, it was important to not have direct sound, because to represent women's and AFAB individuals' sexualities, film—especially pornography—relies heavily on the hyperdimensionality of sound. The unreal started taking the form of a de-genitalized, silent, and very posed sex scene. We did two rehearsals in which the cast and I created several poses, and Nunes proposed a series of exercises to make them feel more at ease with their bodies and with other’s. We talked about the limits of each person, what could be shown and what not, what could be touched and what not, because it is not possible to do scenes like this without starting from the basic principle of consent. Besides consent, in my view, desire is also fundamental. I needed the cast to crave that scene as much as I did. They won the Special Jury Award at Sundance, and we have won nineteen awards so far, so it seems to me it's all there—not just our great desire for that scene, but for the film as a whole.
Some people think A Wild Patience Has Taken Me Here has too much going on; it mixes very different image regimes, it has a lot of characters, several locations, it doesn't focus on a specific plot...even its title is big! And it's all true. I recognize and embrace the excess. Just as Vange had to have a wild patience until she could feel comfortable with herself, I had to have a wild patience to finally have the opportunity to shoot a film with a budget, and we did it despite Bolsonaro's fascist government. The short was shot in 2019. Due to the pandemic, we were only able to finish it and release it in late 2021. With no perspective of when or if I would be able to make another film again, I put everything I wanted into this one. It is an accumulation, an accumulation of ten years of research, activism, wills, annoyances, and experiences. This short film profoundly transformed me and many who participated in it. After shooting, at least five people have transitioned, including myself. Is a lesbian film made by women and trans people still a lesbian film? I tend to believe so. From here on, the path will be different, but I sense it won't be a lonely one.
—Érica Sarmet, February 7, 2023