14/08/2023 - The Swiss-Portuguese director, whose film pays homage to the women of the Reboleira neighbourhood, talks to us with passion about the tight connection between life and cinema

Four years after O fim do mundo [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Basil Da Cunha
film profile], Basil Da Cunha returns to the Locarno Film Festival to present, once again in the International Competition, his latest feature, Manga D’Terra [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Basil Da Cunha
film profile]. The film, an atypical musical honouring the sounds of Cape Verde, shows the reality of women living in the Reboleira neighbourhood where the filmmaker lives. We talked with him after the film’s premiere about his work with actors and the importance of feeding his stories with the reality lived daily by his protagonists. 

Cineuropa: How did you gain the trust of the inhabitants of Reboleira where many of your films take place?
Basil Da Cunha: This trust established itself progressively from film to film, we’ve been working together for thirteen years. Life and cinema mix together a lot, which means that scenes begin before the camera starts rolling and continue after it is turned off. As the years went by, people naturally started to feel that we were inserting the neighbourhood into the national story. As a director, I wanted to leave a trace of their community. I live in this neighbourhood, I share my life with these people and I write the scenes in my films for these people, depending on their personality and their history. Of course, I also add elements of fiction, but it isn’t completely free writing, it is dependent on reality. The director isn’t at all a God or a puppeteer. This is a work bringing together stories and people. Thanks to this, the people from the neighbourhood feel that they have the freedom to exist within the film, to suggest things. I think that they recognise themselves in the film and that they take part in it because they are very generous. Even though this isn’t a process of group writing where everyone contributes ideas, the shooting is thought of for people that I know very well. 

Where did this idea of making a musical film come from? Could we say that, in the film, music has for the protagonist a therapeutic function?
What I made is a musical that does not exist and that I would have loved to see, a musical that pays homage to a type of music I love and which does not get the recognition it deserves. At Cape Verde, there are lots of types of traditional music, many genres. There, I have never met a musician who wasn’t exceptional. Many of those wonderful musicians have come to Portugal, in neighbourhoods such as the one I live in. I dreamt of making a musical that would honour this music, which brings together traditional music, jazz and rock. Music also allows me to talk about what the images do not show, and to touch the depths of the souls of my characters. If the film is moving, it’s also because of the music, which isn’t a simple artifice for adding some emotion.  

In your film, you often show faces in the foreground. Where does this desire to look at bodies come from? What do bodies tell us of the lives of these characters?
There are several things. Firstly, I would say that since my film is made from the inside, we of course show what is usually hidden. When journalists film neighbourhoods like Reboleira, they often do so with the same lenses they would use for animal documentaries. This is so that they can film from a long distance and avoid getting too close. Unlike them, through the tools we use — 50 mm, 35 mm — we are truly among the people. This is also born from the desire to map out those faces, because these are faces and bodies that tell us so many things about the history of the neighbourhood’s inhabitants. 

(Translated from French)