O ESTRANHO (The Intrusion) is our second project as co-directors. It provided an opportunity to deepen our shared cinematographic research interests: asking how the different layers of history that constitute a territory might be revealed through the subjectivities of the people that live on it? How can human, everyday gestures also reveal this collective, territorial subjectivity? In this sense, the research is itself akin to an act of historical, material and immaterial, excavation.
A symbol of progress and a monument to the globalized world, the Guarulhos International Airport outside São Paolo is also a testament to the violent process of invasion and colonization of its territory. The Indigenous Guarulhos people disappeared a few years before the first Jesuit settlement was established in the area. Before long, the land suffered exploitation by the mining efforts of colonists, who brought with them the Tupi as enslaved labour. Enslaved Africans were also involved in the construction of the village and as farm labourers. Such was the case as well for many migrants from the northeast, fleeing poverty for opportunities that emerged in the waves of industrialization throughout the 1950s to 1970s. The airport was built in 1985, and like the succession of civilizations that define this continent, its territory is an accumulation of invisible (and visible) ruins.
We came to understand this landscape not as a site of simple contemplation, but as a space full of layers of meaning, one marked by confrontations between social forces and diverse temporalities.
Unlike most films about airports, O ESTRANHO is not concerned with travellers, but rather follows the paths of the residents and workers who activate the facilities and inhabit the territory. They are the ones who guide our gaze through internal corridors, restricted access areas, the neighbouring streets, revealing existences otherwise rendered invisible. We chose to shoot with a reduced crew so that the narrative material might emerge from a more direct encounter, one free of major interventions, with real spaces in full operation (such as runways and departure lounges at the airport), and with a mix of fictional and real characters.
Research, preparation, and shooting were processes of true immersion in the territory of Guarulhos, which led us to perceive its reality as something essentially heterogeneous and multiple. The more we directed our gaze (and camera) to the daily routines of airport workers and the spaces they pass through, the more this reality revealed itself as rich and surprising. Next to the airport we found the expected populous urban neighbourhoods, but also rural communities, hidden archeological sites, and Indigenous villages undergoing reclamation. Thus, we came to understand this landscape not as a site of simple contemplation, but as a space full of layers of meaning, one marked by confrontations between social forces and diverse temporalities. Just like a person's inner universe, the landscape is a pulsating process in constant construction.
Our approach to the film proposed its own process of exchange with the territory; we offered—through the writing of the script, mise-en-scène, and editing—fictional elaborations that would allow us to reflect on the multiple historical layers, agents, and landscapes contained therein. Simultaneously, we fed this same construction with real and concrete elements (people, stories, images) collected throughout this immersion. It was through the convergence and tensioning of these pluralities that we arrived at a macro vision of the reality that surrounds our characters.
Flora Dias, Juruna Mallon
