Notes on a Life-Saving Film

What a horrible thing the cinema is. What a mess of nostalgia it shoves into our eyes...

What a marvel cinema is, this backyard of unavoidable ghosts that we try to stage as victories of the spirit – individual, collective, ancestral? – and which survives on the threshold of our abandonment.

This note is about the fragility of time, the filmmaker’s wounds, and the very idea of the films we make to try to survive ourselves. It’s about it being impossible to touch the memory of a woman (Zizi, my Grandmother) who carried so many times, secrets, and layers on her back, in her fingernails, and in her words.

In a country made up of ruins and buried voices, is the only possible cinema that of haunting? Could cinema be a magical mountain that we keep as a refuge or to feed on, like an immense, fermenting, loving, and inescapable tree?

A buried cultural memory is a mark of death. A buried seed is a life to come. How do we know if our cinematic nostalgia is a grave or a seed?

Sometimes a movie appears to us as the last possible one. Sometimes it feels like the first one we’ve ever made. This one, this ZIZI, could perhaps be described as the only one I should have made in my lifetime (even before I became a filmmaker?).
Not because it’s better (or worse) than any other film I’ve tried to make, but because maybe it’s the one where all the movies – those of 20 years ago and those of an uncertain future – are accumulated, planted, buried?

A buried cultural memory is a mark of death. A buried seed is a life to come. How do we know if our cinematic nostalgia is a grave or a seed?

So this short film is just an attempt to create a ritual in which this woman-cinema (this woman-fable) is back among us in the backyard she created and trying to help us answer this question.

Between silent beauties and the noisy scars of a family (too Brazilian?), I try to return to the scraps of our bodies and a place that is as common as it is magical, created by violence, joy, and exile.

And so, between an infinite tree and an infinite woman, we are left with the remnants of the filmmaker that I once wanted to be, that I could be in the future, or that never existed. Who knows, maybe it’s me and the films I’ve made are just dust from a story invented by Dona Zizi (one Christmas Eve) under the canopy of this tree (with its immense fruit) where I so often wanted so badly to disappear?

Felipe M. Bragança