On Building Up Trust and Getting People to Open Up

Noe Mendelle, Director of SDI, was asked to make a documentary about a housing research project led by Edinburgh University and Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Here are some reflections on her experience.

The Cement City

The Home Space project is based on a 20 year research on how the suburbs and land around Maputo is changing. The cement city aka Maputo city centre is like a fungus growing at the expense of the land around it. The suburbs around the city are mainly self-built dwellings, first out of bamboo now slowly being replaced by cement blocks and corrugated iron. At a time when land had no value, plots were given to poor people mainly dislocated during the war, to cultivate. Over the years families grew and so did poverty and plots got divided and sold off, often sacrificing the allotments where women grew the household food.

“Barrios”  mushroomed all around Maputo in what appears an up hazard fashion but functionable.  After many years of peace, now Maputo is fast developing into a beautiful city, favoured by many Europeans to move in and make their fortune. Entrepreneurs and land developers are ceasing an amazing opportunity to get rid of the slums and buy off the land for peanuts and build all the infrastructures alongside elegant villas and condoniums. The poor are happy because for a very brief moment they have money in their pockets and the promise of another plot of land far away from the city. Most employment for men will be in the city, therefore to be living even further away than they already are will mean that in no time at all they will mainly drink and eat their cash before having a chance to construct a new house. To put it blantly they are being squezed.

Meeting Luis and Mama Maria

For the documentary I am working with families who are living in different parts of the city to see how they get affected. The family the furthest away – 20km- consists of a polygamist, living with his second and third wife, in a 2 room- house. The furniture consists of one bed and one chair and my guess is that it is for Luis, the head of household. Last year he sold half of his land in order to keep drinking. The first day I was introduced to him and went to ask him for permission to film, the ritual around this request is very typical of traditions of that part of the world. I had a male fixer who spoke Changana and the three of us stood there under the shade of the tree for at least an hour, with a lot of greetings and enquiries about health and good being of the family but nothing too specific, followed by long pauses and silences before we get to the matter in hand, but then quickly diverted by something else, then a return to the request, then another greeting to a passer by and so on… The outcome was to ring him and then maybe we could make direct arrangements. Of course it took several phone calls and several visits before I saw him again. That gave me plenty of opportunities to meet up with the main wife and sit under the tree that she uses to sell her vegetables to passers-by, who are only neighbours as we are in the last rural part of the boundaries of Maputo. But not for long, as neighbours are all splitting their plots and selling it off to better off families from the city centre who are wanting to pursue the national dream of building their own homes. The wife did not say much while I was hanging around and I started to despair that I will not be able to cover their story until I proposed to go with her to her Machamba (allotment), another 8km away from the house. We got there soon after 5am and desperate to get her to open up I took the line of provocation asking if this plot of land will be the next sale by her husband Luis. She retaliated very quickly that the land is hers and not to be sold by her drunken husband. The sad reality is if the land belongs to anyone it will be the man. Widows are often thrown out their houses after the death of the husband either by sons or uncles.

‘It is very important not to give up with the silence of characters and use different spaces to get them to open up’

The allotment was beautifully kept, planning the basic food to keep the drunken husband, herself, her daughter, her 2 grand-children and  the third wife with her off springs and a little surplus to sell in order to buy basic necessities. It is very important not to give up with the silence of characters and use different spaces to get them to open up. The allotment was her space and from then on I could not get her to stop talking.  We kept meeting other women at the water point, with the same determination on their faces and one can only imagine that their stories are not too dissimilar to Mama Maria.

Noe

Filed under: Filmmaking, Maputo, Mozambique, Noe Mendelle, The Home Space Project

On Working with Foreign Language

Mama Teresa and her two grandchildren

Noe Mendelle, Director of SDI, was asked to make a documentary about a housing research project led by Edinburgh University and Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Here are some reflections on her experience.

Do we need to understand every word to shoot a sequence?

Mama Teresa was my favourite right from the beginning. She spoke a few Portuguese words but went on speaking to me in Changana, her local language. The energy she gave out seemed to allow me to understand what she was communicating. I have used translators in past situations but although we gain information through the translation, I often feel very frustrated because the attention, focus, keeps slipping from the character to the translator and part of me stops feeling the person that I’m filming. So I  took the decision not to work with a translator and allow me to go with the feel of her and allow her to just talk to me, whenever she wants, knowing that I did not understand her. No  doubt I will discover crucial details during editing and probably get kicked by my editor for not having followed some of the leads. But I ask myself:  do we need to understand every word to shoot a sequence? Can’t we sometimes just work on the feel of it?

How do we film the invisible, the impalpable?

By forcing myself to film what I feel next to this woman, I look around and try to use my camera to capture light and images to translate and create meaning to those feelings/energy. I often try to reflect on how do we film the invisible, the impalpable?
It was a risk but something to play with during editing.

Click on the links to read part I or part II of this thread.

Filed under: Filmmaking, Changana, Maputo, Mozambique, Noe Mendelle

On Filmmakers Participation

Noe Mendelle, Director of SDI, was asked to make a documentary about a housing research project led by Edinburgh University and Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Here are some reflections on her experience.

Mozambique

Bank banner advertising a credit scheme in Maputo: 'We will help you redecorate your home, invest in education, go on holiday and look after your health.'

A bank banner advertising a credit scheme in Maputo: ‘We will help you redecorate your home, invest in education, go on holiday and look after your health.’ Mozambique is a Socialist country but with a privatised infrastructure, such as most education, electricity, water, transport etc… all except the land. So technically people get offered a plot of land but do not own it! The power of banks is only starting, as most people are self employed or do not earn enough to be paid through banks, unless you work for the government. Anything they save, they invest in developing their house: a few more cement blocks or cement bags or corrugated iron… With the privatisation of water, most people have a tap in their yard but many cannot afford it, so children and women will walk to a selling point and buy one jerry can at a time for 20 medicais (50 pence). The electricity is re-bought. They go to petrol stations or kiosks and have a primitive system of “pay as you go.”

Buying Electricity

The other day I asked Mama Teresa to take me with her on her next electricity shopping trip. She fed the babies, changed them and then put one on her back and one on her front to walk the 3km to the petrol station. I did not realise it was this far and in good faith happily left her carrying her double burden while filming her walking through the maze of alleys. Only when I realised she was sweating profusely, I understood the effort involved, so I took both babies. If she can do it, I can do it! And then went on filming… Rather badly! Babies and cameras do not mix well! I think that is when the local community realised that I wasn’t just a white woman, I was a mad white woman… and that deserves many laughs.

But I gained trust by showing the community that the woman and the camera are an item and it was no longer a surprise to be met by me filming in alleys…

Noe

Click on the links to read part I or part III of this thread.

Filed under: Filmmaking, Maputo, Mozambique, Noe Mendelle

On Filming in Maputo, Mozambique

Noe Mendelle, Director of SDI, was asked to make a documentary about a housing research project led by Edinburgh University and Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Here are some reflections on her experience.

Maputo

Maputo's suburbia from the plane

I rented a room in the centre of town as public transport tends to be reduced to “chapas” – little mini buses which are always so full that you have young men’s bums sticking out of the windows and they have this tendency to break down, making any journey a challenge to time and patience…

First morning, after a night of heavy rain, I woke up to the croaking of frogs and a city landscape transformed into lakes of murky waters and floating rubbish. I’d never thought of packing my Wellington boots. My project is about the way the city of Maputo has dramatically expanded over the last few years, creating a large suburb of what appears to be endless slums. For the first few days it was extremely difficult to access the families I was going to work with, as the lanes were transformed into a slalom of mud. As days passed by I grew more anxious, having only 3 weeks to research and film this project. But the sun returned and I was able to get on with the next challenge, getting to know my families, and start filming.

‘The camera is not only a way of measuring the distance of our two worlds but also an obstruction to a helping hand’

At the beginning of  every shoot I always returned to the same debate in my head: do I start filming immediately, or do I allow myself to settle in? In the context of Africa often you don’t even get a choice as people don’t allow you to film… full stop. There is a well funded suspicion that cameras will take your soul away, only to financially benefit the filmmaker. How can I explain to them that I make a living wanting to give voice to forgotten people… I might be genuine but they don’t really care about me being a messenger. They look at my immaculate white T-Shirt probably produced by child labour in China and my chauffeured 4 wheel drive and hiss “What’s in it for me?” And I think of Sergei Dvortsevoy, when he talked about “feeling bad at turning people’s lives into Art and then abandoning them to their own devices” which led him to his decision to give up documentary. He  could no longer stand that strained relationship with his characters. I tried as much as possible to delay payments by bringing presents, mainly in the form of rice, flour, oil and then at the end some money for the ones who need to buy medication and a new capolena (material used as skirt) in order to offer those women something colourful and for them. But every visit was a reminder and a re-negotiation of that relationship.

It is harder to do it with characters I feel emotionally involved. The camera is not only a way of measuring the distance of our two worlds but also an obstruction to a helping hand.

Mama Teresa

Mama Teresa, left

One of my characters is this lovely old grandma who during daytime looks after her two ten months old grand-children and goes fishing at night. She normally walks 8km to get to the sea, in the dark, barefoot, carrying her nets on her head. The night I went with her, even for the sake of the film I could not let her walk when I knew I had a car at my disposal… so I decided not to cheat it either in the film and pretend she walked there… but how do I communicate the distance she has to walk every night to go fishing? When we got to the beach the tide was still high so we had to hang out for a couple of hours. Mama Teresa  then proceeded to walk in the sea with her fishing companion, up to their necks, despite the rain and the cold wind. They walked and pulled on their nets till 2am.

It was pitch dark and impossible to film so I sat in the car with my assistant, a local young man, who just finished his MA in sociology but could not find any work in his field at university because he was not member of Frelimo, the national party. He went on explaining his political frustration as a young citizen, waiting to see the generation of the Heroes of Liberation to die off to create a gap for change. But he now realised that they have already produced a class of technocrats who were protecting their interests, leaking that corruption into different parts of society… such as the police.

Just as we were mentioning them, a truck with ten officers, armed with old Russian rifles appeared. The chief, short and angry, possibly drunk, made us get out of the car and question our presence at 2am on Friday night by the seaside. Any other country, we may have had an apology for maybe interrupting what could have been a romantic interlude, here we were immediately treated with suspicion. Of course we had to provide papers for the car, and for ourselves. The search of the car brought the presence of the camera, which made us even more suspicious despite my permit for filming. His preoccupation was, it was pitch dark with nothing to film and the car did not belong to a TV company. We insisted that somewhere in the vast darkness we had a couple of fishing people and that not all cameras belong to TV. The rifles got closer to our chests for extra dose of intimidation,  as we were trying to convince them to fine us , if we had broken the law. Corrupt police hate fines, as it is paperwork leaving trails behind and they only get 10% of the fine, which amongst several of them is not worth the trouble… what they really want is to get people into panic and give them money to let go. Disappointed that our cold sweat did not turn into cash, they drove off, just as our couple was coming out of the sea.

What comes first: the film or the people?

I did not dare getting my camera out for a while but when they started climbing the rocks I just had to go. Mama Teresa was shivering in her wet clothes and her tired limbs made her extremely slow at climbing those slippery rocks. I stood there with my camera, thinking that I should go and help her, but if I did I did not have any ending to this sequence and maybe I did not have any scene as it was so dark. Help Sergei… what comes first the film or the people? You have your answer but I am still searching for mine… or in this case I chose the film. Mama Teresa greeted me with a happy laugh and a clap of her hands. She was so delighted that we were still there, not just because they were going to get a lift home, but because she felt we cared enough to stand in the dark and worry about them. Her life is like a little scratch on the video… it will be seen by people beyond her world. She laid her catch at my feet as proud as a cat with a dead bird and when I enquired how much it was worth she said 200 medicais equivalent of 4 beers or 4 cups of coffee local price!

Click on the links to read part II or part III of this thread.

Filed under: Filmmaking, Maputo, Mozambique, Noe Mendelle, Sergei Dvortsevoy, The Home Space Project

Dockanema honors esteemed director, Ruy Guerra

Ruy Guerra

For its 6 edition Dockanema decided to celebrate Ruy Guerra. At the Brazilian cultural centre he decided to talk about the 3 moments of his life: poet, photographer, actor, scriptwriter, editor, but above all film director, born in 1931 in the city now known as Maputo. In his youth in Maputo, he was active against Portuguese colonization and racism, which of course got him into trouble with the authorities. His father worried for his safety and decided to send him abroad.

Moment I

His passion for cinema made him consider 3 possibilities in Europe to learn filmmaking.

1/ Cinecitta – but it was for observers only

2/ Lodze film school, but you had to learn Polish for one year, then 2 years theory and then you got to practice. He was far too petulant for that.

3/ IDHEC; now known as La Femis French National Film School.

Off he went, to live the Rive Gauche bohemian life, which no doubt was a great training for future hardship as a filmmaker. After the course he remained in Paris and got involved with the Nouvelle Vague at a time when a major debate was taking place: Is there such a thing as authored cinema and can it be the 7th art, when it is produced with machines and a team of people?

Moment II

Missing speaking Portuguese and not being able to return to Mozambique, he finally decided to migrate to Brazil in ’58, passing from Nouvelle Vague to Cinema Novo, a group of Brazilian filmmakers trying to break with tradition in search of a new Brazilian identity, beyond football and Samba. This radical, political cinema became a movement but was stopped in its tracks by the violent military dictatorship when they came to power in ’64, and stayed there for the next 20 years.

Moment III

In 1975, when Mozambique became independent, he was able to return to his native country and offered to help in the creation of Mozambican cinema. He played an important role in training young filmmakers and setting up a popular network for distributing and showing films. In order to support film production in Mozambique he created Kanemo. He brought in prominent figures from the international world of film to collaborate with the National Cinema Institute.

Ruy Guerra is better known internationally for his fiction but while he was in Mozambique he produced many documentaries. His work, regardless if it is fiction or documentary, is imbued with visual poetry. The slow pacing allows the viewer to soak in every detail of the image and characteristics of the characters. His artistic output is marked by a close link between reality and fiction.

“I have a tendency to treat reality as an aspect of fiction.” he told Cahier du Cinema in 2000. He views fiction as documentary or the documentary as fiction because “reality is already fictionalized from the symbols of our world” – the representation of our world and the way we perceive it through our senses is already fiction…

‘Os Fuzis’, 1964

His two films that have won the most awards ‘Os Fuzis‘ and ‘A Queda‘, are probably the highest achievement of his vision of cinema.

It was such pity that most people who turned up to listen to him were mainly of his own generation, when he has so much to share with the up and coming filmmakers. Did the political will not just leave the government but also an entire new generation?

In order not to leave his audience with this depressing thought, he cracked a joke about wanting to live until 117, in order to have a fourth moment in his life and finish writing a novel. I hope that does not mean no more films…

Noe Mendelle

Filed under: Festivals, Brazil, Cinema Novo, Dockanema, Mozambique, Ruy Guerra

Noe’s Letter from Maputo

Some of you may have heard of Maputo, the capital of Mozambique but I wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t. It is a large country in the south of Africa, with a very long coast on the Indian Ocean and sharing many borders with South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania. Not only do they share borders but also a history of wars and colonialism. Except that Mozambique was the only territory in that part of Africa colonized by Portugal, which meant independence only came once Portugal got rid of its own fascist government in 1975.

Samora Machel, President of Mozambique from 1975 until 1986

Then came the golden era of its left wing liberator, Samora Machel. Again many people wouldn’t even know his name, but he was a bigger version of Mandela, with as much of a passion for his people as he had for life. Less than 10 years later – at a time when Aparteid in South Africa was at its most threatening, and in retaliation of Mozambique’s offering political refuge to South African militants – his presidential plane crashed ‘by accident,’ leaving Mozambique a helpless widow.

This is a long introduction to talk about Dockanema, Mozambique’s annual documentary festival, but Mozambique has always had a special place in the history of cinema. After independence, Machel realized that cinema would be crucial in communicating ideas to the people, so the Institute of Cinema was created and every week films were made and distributed around the huge bush territory with ambulant cinemas. That caught the imagination of European filmmakers who took into spending time in Mozabique, such as Godard, Jean Rouche etc…To this day, France is one the main provider of finance to filmmaking here.

‘Nostalgia de la Luz’, Patricio Guzman, 2010

This year I’m honoured to be a guest of the 6th edition of Dockanema. We are talking about a low budget, no frill festival. Yet Pedro Pimenta, the director and his wonderful team managed to squat four wonderful spaces with screening facilities and cafes for people to meet and have a good selection of international films at their disposal. Not the latest, but definitely good food for thought….and this is what festivals are about: feelings and reflection, and what better opening film than ‘Nostalgia de la Luz’ by Guzman, in which he mixes astronomy and historical memory. The visiting of memory is crucial at a time when there are so many political and economic insecurities, not as a nostalgic journey but as a tool to create a forward vision.

The success of Dockanema is allowing other mini festivals and distribution networks to slowly develop in other parts of the country.

Official Website: www.dockanema.org

Filed under: Festivals, Dockanema, Mozambique, Patricio Guzman, Samora Machel