Cabo Polonio is considered the most inhospitable place in Uruguay. How did you get to this place and what did you feel on that first meeting?
When you travel through South America, coincidences are no longer coincidences. You give importance to time, lived in another way, to unforeseen encounters, to words between the lines, to chance. In the search for an Azorean connection to that country – and before I learned that the city of São Carlos had been populated by Azorean families – a Uruguayan woman told me: You must get to know Cabo Polonio. I was there two days later. The decision to film there, to never forget and also to better understand. And then to share that reality, then became a certainty and an urgency.
We explore the landscape with the same awareness as Luana. How did you work the way of seeing that place?
We put ourselves in Luana’s shoes many times – or at least we tried to. And we often asked ourselves what childhood was in the end, what it was like to be a child in such a place. Our curiosity was sociological, but this was inevitably invaded by the emotions of life itself, with the presence of humanity in a place that is much more nature and landscape than human.
The landscape, the house, the animals. How did you conceive the montage of the film and the interaction between these various elements?
As if they flow without running over each other, as we really live them. That the montage would honestly respect exactly what was lived and felt. When looking at the images, so many years after being filmed, they are the ones that tell us what happened while we lived there.
