Direction’s notes
For a long time I have been thinking of a making a film that was a balance of generation. Of the generation of 68 from which I’m part of, and whose experience in Brazil is pretty different from the world known imaginary and that has been transmitted for 40 years.
It is true that the Latin America, like Vietnam, were in the center of the speech of 68 (La faute à Fidel), but we know little about the history of those for whom rocks weren’t enough to threaten established dictatorships.
Different from the characters from the film The Barbarian Invasions, this generation in Brazil has lived an extreme situation during the military dictatorship, when the tortures and murders were institutional practices. Also different is its participation in the Brazilian society today. Among the survivors, many are found in the Government, others have an important presence in the intellectual debate. In a country with social problems still pretty serious, this generation today is part of the elite.
I don’t have, however, the intention to make another inventory of the utopias of 68 or The Barbarian Invasions with a Brazilian flavor. Far from working about the twilight of a civilization, this film wants to talk about a history that is still being created: the history of utopia facing the power, facing the fragilities, doubts and intimate wounds of those whose children still consider “heroes”.
A memória que me contam comes from this wish that was fed for so long. But during the development of the script, some facts occurred in Brazil overlapped the characters that we were developing:
The death, in December of 2007, of Vera Silvia Magalhães, true icon of resistance and of the Brazilian Left;
The prison in Rio de Janeiro of Cesare Battisti, former member of a communist group of armed conflict from Italy, threatened with extradition. Battisti is the fifth Italian arrested over the last five years in Brazil, accused of terrorism. The last four, that lived in the country for about twenty years were released by the Supreme Federal Court, which considered their activities political and not terrorist and gave them the right of asylum.
The publication of the report «O direito à memória e à verdade» [The right to memory and to the truth], that reports 400 cases of tortures and violence committed during the dictatorship by the Brazilian state, initiative that provoked once more the debate about the amnesty and the impunity of old torturers. Following, in November of 2011, the creation of the Truth Commission that intends to reveal the acts against the human rights committed during the dictatorship.
Vera Silvia Magalhães, who inspired the main character of the film, Ana, was an ex-guerilla, one of the people responsible for the kidnap of the North American ambassador in Brazil in 1969, who became a myth of the Left. Very tortured, after the prison and the exile, she never regained an important participation in the Brazilian society.
Several times she was hospitalized in psychotic crisis, when the experience of the torture would come back like had never left her. She had cancer twice. In these moments of hospitalization, all her friends of the time, former comrades, ex-guerillas, group of which I participated, would gather in the hospital. On the breaks of this crises, she would continue to collect admirers of several ages, attracted by her refined sense of humor, intelligence and ability of seduce that she would exercise even when really weakened.
In 2007 she was hospitalized with emphysema and her body already weakened from all the diseases and the several psychiatric medications. Her friends though it would be another hospitalization. She died after a month, causing a big commotion among many of those who resisted the Brazilian dictatorship.
ANA, the character freely inspired in Vera Silvia, will be introduced in the film as a fantasy of the main characters. For them, she appears young, like when they meet her. In the film, ANA is created as she was a kaleidoscope formed by the different visions of each one of her friends.
The decision of leaving ANA eternally young started from the difficulty we have in deciphering a myth. ANA will remain in the history with her beauty. She is the synthesis of all the contradictions of her generation. She is the heroic past and the doubts of the present, where the corruption and the presence of the torture remain as a heritage for the poor people of the country. This veiled guilty that they all live with for having survived is softened with time and the strength of the daily life. But ANA’s own existence, her rebellion, her pain, her madness, also help to extenuate this guilty as it was possible for someone to be the bridge between past and present, between dead and alive.
A common issue to everyone that meets again in that waiting room: what is to survive? What drive made them chose life? In IRENE’s case, the answer is in the cinema. My films somehow always addressed the dictatorship/violence, the conflict of generations and the cinema. In A memória que me contam the cinema is a dream possible that was left to me.