Filipa Reis and João Miller Guerra's Djon África (2018), which is receiving an exclusive global online premiere on MUBI, is showing August 17 – September 16, 2018 as a Special Discovery.
For most international observers, the Rotterdam Hivos Tiger Competition slot for Djon África was the first introduction to the Portuguese filmmaking duo of Filipa Reis and João Miller Guerra. Yet, over the past decade they have quietly built a rather impressive body of short and medium-length work that has been a constant presence in the Portuguese festival circuit, with wins at IndieLisboa and DocLisboa, and traveled to some international fests (like Cinéma du Réel or DokLeipzig). Reis and Guerra have also regularly supported directors such as Golden Bear winner Leonor Teles or The Nothing Factory’s Pedro Pinho (a regular collaborator who scripted the original treatment for Djon África). Most of their own work is documentary in nature or origin, dealing openly with the daily lives of immigrants to Portugal, whether second- or third-generation youths born in the country to African parents or Brazilians attempting a new beginning.
Djon África, their first full-length feature, is a departure: a loose fiction following Miguel, born in Portugal to Cape Verdean parents, making his first trip to the “motherland” he only heard of through his grandmother. Miguel is played by non-professional Miguel Moreira, whom Reis and Guerra first followed as a teenager in their 2010 DocLisboa winner Li Ké Terra; the new film takes off from his own personal experience into a fictional journey of self-discovery, whose loose plotting and hypnotic rhythms can remind you of work by current day film travelers such as Ben Rivers or Oliver Laxe.
We spoke with the two directors over coffee at Lisbon’s Cinemateca, shortly before they left for Rotterdam to premiere Djon África. The film has since been presented at the Lincoln Center’s New Directors/New Films series and at Buenos Aires’ BAFICI and won the FIPRESCI award and a special mention at the Uruguay Film Festival.
NOTEBOOK: You describe Djon África as a fictional feature, but even when looked at through your previous work, you don’t really know where the boundaries between fiction and reality are. Why do you consider this more of a fiction?
FILIPA REIS: This film was a lot more thought through in the project stage. The writing took two years—first a larger treatment, and then an actual script with dialogue—so it was pretty much designed as fiction. It was the opposite of the process we usually take—when we did documentaries, we found the film’s structure by writing after we’d filmed, here we wrote everything first and then let the documentary in. And that was the big difference for us: starting with a very tight, very thought-over structure, then letting go of it. The script was a sort of “bible,” a fictional skeleton that helped us—we could always get back to it if we needed to, but we were looking for something more sensory, let the trip inside the story. Blow up the fiction from the inside and let the scenes take us elsewhere into more of a feeling than of a structure.
JOÃO MILLER GUERRA: We knew the character inside out, and we knew the character’s Portuguese context inside out, but we didn’t really know Cape Verde as well, so what Pedro [Pinho] wrote was essential for us. Miguel’s adventure, initially, was suggested by Pedro. But we had never really shot a script, we’d only done treatments where scenes and situations were indicated but there was no dialogue. Here we had dialogue. We had never worked like this. Also, Filipa and I wanted to overlay a more oneiric, fantastic side over Pedro’s original material, which was something else we’d never had in our own films so far.
NOTEBOOK: Where does that come from?
GUERRA: On my side, from my time as an artist. I was a painter for a long time and it always anguished me how there seemed to be a disparity between one thing and the other, how reality and fantasy wouldn’t communicate. This is probably the first time I linked both. The film did have some painterly references, and we do share an interest in that more psychedelic universe.
REIS: It’s also connected to the Cape Verdean drink that is grogue [an artisanal sugarcane rum], and the intoxication it creates, the altered state and where it leads you. Cape Verde has that effect quite a lot. It’s not so much about alcohol intoxication—though there is that—but it’s related more to a place where you are there in a way we can no longer be in the Western world. It’s like accessing a side of us that is more castrated here in Lisbon.
NOTEBOOK: So it’s an intoxication of the shoot, rather than of the page.
REIS: Exactly. We already wanted that, it was suggested on the script. Before, we found people and wrote the films around them; here we wrote the characters then went looking for their actors. Of course you adjust as you find them. And the experience of the shoot helped a lot since all of the cast and crew was in that mood as well [laughs]. At some point Vasco Viana, the DP, was suggesting things…
NOTEBOOK: The first act, in Portugal, is very traditionally constructed as a fiction. Once you arrive in Cape Verde it’s as if you let the film absorb the strangeness, as if the narrative slowly disintegrates. Like the crossing of the desert that Miguel needs to find himself.
REIS: That was in the original director’s note—to start out as something very controlled then head out into the unknown. Going from Portugal to Cape Verde was a metaphor for going from somewhere we knew to somewhere we didn’t know, from a written-through fictional narrative to a fiction open enough to be adventurous. When we came back from Cape Verde, we weren’t sure it would work. We were sure there was a structure that we had filmed, but we weren’t sure it would allow us to open the film in that way. In the editing we started taking risks, experimenting, and realizing it was okay, it worked, we could go further.
NOTEBOOK: So it’s a film found in the editing?
REIS: Our certainty that it could work, that we could cross that desert, was found in the editing.
GUERRA: There were moments in the editing room we pretty much despaired! Because there was stuff we wanted to leave in but there was no room for them, since they extended the length and then we couldn’t find a way back to the narrative structure. That was when we decided to accept the experimentation, and say, yes, this needs to be a lot more open.
NOTEBOOK: You structured the film around a non-professional actor, but at the same time you’re placing him in a situation that can be difficult even for a veteran actor, which is to let go of all reference points.
REIS: That wasn’t easy. When we wrote the film Miguel was 18, 19. By the time we had all the financing in place he was 25; by then he was a different Miguel, with a different awareness in himself. There had been an innocence in his acting that was lost and that we were always trying to recapture. And he was used to a minimal crew, five or so. Here he needed to adjust to a bigger crew with 12, 13 people.
GUERRA: I don’t think he was expecting to react the way he did to Cape Verde. We sort of expected him to, though, because we never let him come with us on our prep visits. We wanted to take him by surprise, let his first reactions take over—that comes from our documentary experience, and that was why he only came with us for the shoot proper.
REIS: We shot chronologically.
GUERRA: But we were aware that the first contact with Cape Verde was not going to be exactly what he expected. He had a fantasy in his head that didn’t square up with reality.
NOTEBOOK: Which is what the film is about.
GUERRA: Looking for his father turns out to be a dead end; what he is doing is going looking for himself. That matches Miguel’s own feelings—when he got to Cape Verde he probably never stopped feeling like a tourist because that’s what everybody made him feel like, just like in the film. At the same time, he didn’t really go looking for his father because he wasn’t so much looking for him. He’s never met his father, who wasn’t that big a presence in his life, he had no particular wish to meet him. It was much more about going on an adventure and learning about a reality his grandmother had told him about—but that was a non-existing Cape Verde, since his grandmother hasn’t been back in 40 years. It was a fantasy of Cape Verde that magically matches the story in the film. Since there was no real need for him to identify with that place, all that’s left it’s the inner voyage he makes.
REIS: It was difficult sometimes to ask him to play things he wasn’t really feeling but that we needed for the film. In all our previous collaborations we’d always asked him to be himself.
GUERRA: And here we were, asking him for the first time not to be himself, and that was a game he didn’t quite know how to play. He would react his own way, not the way we’d like him to.
NOTEBOOK: At times it feels his discomfort is shared by you as well.
REIS: Oh, completely. That was probably why this was meant to be our first feature, there was freedom, experimentation… Our production structure allowed us to try everything once. We felt it was a unique opportunity to experiment. At times it felt unrepeatable. It’s like going on a “grand train tour” across Europe—it’s something you do when you’re young and which makes you feel totally free.
GUERRA: We did that instead by going to Cape Verde!
NOTEBOOK: Speaking of actors, there’s a particularly striking presence in the film—that of Idélia, the old woman that Miguel lives with for a while. She’s a force of nature. How do you direct someone like her?
REIS: You don’t! We’d tell her what we wanted, what we were looking for. First she would do the scene how she very well wanted to. Then, on the second take, she would put in everything we’d said but in her own words.
GUERRA: The big speech that she makes, or rather takes over, comes from a book by Daniel Quinn called Ishmael, which retells the narrative of civilization. There was a passage of the book that she chewed over and spit out in Creole by her, in her own way.
NOTEBOOK: You’ve been working together for a long time now. What’s your division of labor? Is there stuff that comes more from one or the other?...
GUERRA: Not sure about that one.
REIS: We do different things, we have different concerns… I’m normally more with the characters and the actors.
GUERRA: Filipa focuses more on continuity, on narrative. I’m more disruptive, I’m more interested in the framing, in the camera set-up, in the color, in the feeling.
Parts of this interview were first printed in and appear courtesy of Portuguese daily Público.