The generation of 68 by itself
(by Lucia Murat, the screenwriter that lived 68)
For me it was essential to have with me in the script representatives of the new generation. I didn’t want to make a nostalgic film. (Although I do not consider myself nostalgic. I have a very stimulating life and stimulated by the cinema, which allows me to follow the times that go by.) But my view - like Irene actress says about the time - will always have the strength of this time in which everything was lived on the edge. Life and death. Lost. Survival. Torture. And needed a counterpoint.
That’s why I called Tatiana Salem Levy to work with me on the script.
We didn’t intend with the film to answer some recurrent questions - like: What was the legacy of the generation of 68? - because we didn’t want to make a film of thesis. That’s why we weren’t interested in answers. The doubts, the impressions and the pains should, in my opinion, be what the film was about, coming from two different generations. We also didn’t want to fall in the cliché of the Left militant parent with the son of the financial market. The most interesting would be to contradict this cliché and work with a new generation that is also critical and thinks about the social issue. Just lives in another time.
I always work with research, even in subjects I know a lot. The interviews of Vera Silvia contributed to format the character Ana in such a way that lots of her texts are from Vera herself. Interviews with artists, from the new and old generations, curators and people who work in the first level of the Government gave us ideas and opened ways.
The most difficult was to transform a film that came from a series of discussions into images. We did not want to be closed in the waiting room nor leave to tell the daily live of each one. On the process, I think we discovered that ideas and impressions meet and can be transformed also in a flow of images, if we can free ourselves from a narrative with beginning, middle and end. Evident that it requires more work, as we are breaking the manuals. But what would be the pleasure of making a film about so much rebellion if we couldn’t exercise our freedom?
Critical legacy
(by Tatiana Salem Levy, the screenwriter that is daughter of 68)
When Lucia invited me to collaborate in the script, I was very excited. First because I had never worked with cinema. Second because this was particularly interesting to me. My parents were part of the resistance to dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s, and I grew up listening to histories of the time, living with ex-political prisoners, people who were tortured, exiled. There were many histories of pain and, however, they did not get to me and to the other children as regret, victimization.
To the contrary. Although the revolution they propose has not succeeded, they never showed the feeling of defeated. The most important was to leave a critical legacy in relation to the world, an opening of thinking. If the revolution did not occur, several small revolutions occurred, fundamental changes in our position in the world.
A memória que me contam emerged as the perspective of transforming in art questions with which I lived my whole life. My dialog with Lucia was spontaneous, we understood each other very well, because we were talking about a common universe, although each one with a different view. She was a living witness. Me, the one who knew the past through memories of others.
And it was exactly this we wanted to explore: How is the live of the survivor? And how the successor builds his history?