Pedro Neves Marques's Becoming Male in the Middle Ages is now showing exclusively on MUBI in most countries starting January 25, 2023, in the series Brief Encounters.
I’m constantly writing stories or poetry. Sometimes these writings lead to nothing, otherwise they’re somehow published. Occasionally they are the spark for a film, either because they challenge me visually, reveal a strong-willed character, or simply carry the emotional mood and political perspective I’m looking for.
Becoming Male in the Middle Ages began as one such story. It offered the emotional substratum that I’ve been focusing my films on these days—emotion as an approach to think through politics past and present. It was, in all regards, a slice-of-life type of story, which I’m also increasingly enamored by—a certain care for mundanity and daily life, which I then inevitably disturb with a very subtle, yet hopefully poignant, speculation or even science fiction.
That story also presented me with Mirene, the woman through whose eyes and heart, aspirations and prejudices, we follow the film’s narrative. This female perspective was absolutely important to me. Furthermore, having her narrate the film also brought it closer to a confession or a recollection, akin to that original feeling of a tightly knit literary short-story.
Loosely inspired by changes in my own life, as well as of close friends dealing with their desire to have children, whether straight women into their late thirties or gay couples, Becoming Male in the Middle Ages tells the story of two close couples. Though Mirene never wished to have a baby, after much nagging she acquiesces to her partner’s wish to do so. At the same time, her dear friend Vicente has, with the support of his husband, begun an experimental procedure, in which he is implanted an ovary so as to experience the feeling, both physical and emotional, of gestation—an ovary from which ova will later be extracted and sent through a regular IVF and surrogacy process. Always loyal throughout, it is Mirene who does much of the emotional heavy-lifting between all these men—until she ultimately comes to a decision all her own.
This is a film that is as much about desires for gestation beyond gender as it is about the reproduction of the family unit; as much about the normativity that easily creeps into gay ways of life as about the possibilities of friendship to rupture hegemonic structures.
I hope to one day do a film featuring exowombs, freeing gestation fully from gender. For now, it was fun to read plenty of male pregnancy stories, mostly in quirky websites online dedicated to this gay fantasy—hence the ovarian implant plot. The broad range of universes I found—from traditional boy-love to space operas—was liberating, for a fan of science fiction as me. Regardless, the normative views on gender, and in particular female experiences, I found in this literature was also troubling enough to inspire me to go and write and shoot a film against the grain of those stories.
In practical terms, this was the first fiction film I shot back in Lisbon, where I’m from, after living and working my entire adult life abroad. It was a strange feeling. Especially because I wrote the first draft of the film script while still living in New York, where I had always imagined this story would take place—even for personal reasons. The challenge, then, was how to adapt these characters and this plot to a much smaller and softer city. The shift definitely changed the film’s mood, making it even more interior and psychological, which I, in fact, appreciate. Given that Lisbon is a city that lives and breathes the Atlantic Ocean, with beaches and retreats close by, it also made me open up the film to more elemental sensations and temporalities: the ocean waves; moon phases; and melancholic sunsets. At the end of the day, I’m glad about that choice.