Casa da Rosa follows the transformation of a space but above all, also of an intimacy. In the end, what is it like to feel at home?
I don’t think you always know. It is not a universal and generalizable subject. It’s a very personal relationship. The house, if we like it, if we invent it as we inhabit it, is not restricted to architecture or construction, but to the dimension of being – in heideggerian terms. In this sense, I believe that the place we inhabit, build, transform, where we sleep, eat, cry, read, and everything else, can be the mirror of our identity. Because the house that welcomes and cradles us – in a bachelardian sense – protects us and restores our image over time. This only happens because a deeply loving relationship is established that makes us feel whole. So, I suspect that the house knows more about us than we do know about it. Filming this relationship with the house is like filming the skin where everything is printed. It’s like revealing images waiting to be unveiled, to show who I was, who I am, or who maybe I will become. When the place where we felt at home is taken away from us, we become raw because the part of us that feels at home is amputated. The emptying of this place is an anticipated mourning. A great pain. In this film, the choice of each shot is a gnosis and a possible mirror of what it is like to feel at home, and what the loss of this feeling is all about. It consists of an intimate act of investigation and knowledge that blends with the essence of cinema itself.
There are several times in this film – the time it takes to move houses, but also a journey in time, comprising a lifetime and the evolution of a city. How were these relationships built throughout the process of the film?
This is the most immediately social and political response. In fact, the gentrification that we have seen in the city of Lisbon due to real estate pressure, tourism, and measures such as the well-known Assunção Cristas’ Law – which backed tourist pressure -, accompanied my stay in Príncipe Real. A wonderful part of the city, which began to be invaded by barbarians, who not only occupied the streets and the sidewalks, but also small places of local retail. Little by little, we became aware of people who were being moved to bordering areas of the city. The presence of shoemaker Alberto is a resistance to all this. And everyone around us seemed to be aware of it. From his friends at the pharmacy, to his guests and, even now, from customers who learned that shoemaker Alberto had also been evicted in the meantime. A cruelty for a man for whom that building was his world and his place.
In a way, shoemaker Alberto and I prepared ourselves to an anticipated grieving, as I say.
The city closes itself to its most representative inhabitants. To me, this weight of an emptying city, this distortion of inhabiting the city, was very clearly related to my feeling. It sustained the urgency and the need for this film, that it is a first-person testimony, a kind of cinematic diary, which speaks for all who live in this situation.
I hope that this film speaks for Alberto, for me, and for so many colleagues and friends who have gone through the same situation. If the technical quality is unexpectedly poor, it is also the image of the poverty of people who, like me, suddenly lose their safe haven. Your house. Your memories. And they are thrown out into the streets. There is no poetry here. Just the realization of what is painful. Shot without fundings, using different equipment, the film tries its best at being a witness and a reflection of the urban loss of a city like Lisbon. A city that unfortunately also loses its memories.
The house is also a place of work, where you wrote, conceived, and edited many of your films, and where you hosted some of the people with whom you developed projects with. What is the relationship between that house and your cinema?
I don’t know if I can talk about a specific relationship between the house – any house, for that matter – and my cinema. However, the many corners of that house, from the wonderful balcony to its beneficial light and spacious rooms with high ceilings, seemed to be meant for me, welcoming and encouraging my work. I always liked having places that were somewhat staged. So, I created corners for gazing, thinking, and reading.
I added a table, an armchair, a pile of books bearing the natural light in mind. I had corners for different activities depending on the light, sound, furniture. An armchair by the window, facing the balcony and the street to ramble on. A sofa, so I could stretch out and write at the same time. A desk, like the one on Billy Wilder’s Front Page, where he kept his notebooks, project by project. A little wheeled table that I used as an easel to paint. And sometimes it happened, depending on the work at hands, to swap the bedroom for the office. To me, a house without an office is an incomplete house – so maybe I can say that the office is my favorite place, maybe my refuge because of my books, my notebooks, and the hours I’ve spent thinking and inventing things that are of no interest to anyone but me. It’s like a hiding place or a workshop full of mechanical things that only I can put to work. It feeds the many ideas, decisions, and indecisions of my creative process. Almost always intuitive. Almost always undisciplined. Always free. So, in every corner of the house there had to be a notebook, a pencil, and a good writing seat. In that house I prepared and produced films. I remembered the places where I was going to shoot. I conceived and tried out scenes. I arranged small work spots to edit documentaries and fiction from several films – such as Arrivederci Macau, O Bailinho, Coração Negro, Pe san Ié, and plays such as Bartleby in Melville’s head, articles for Hoje Macau, scripts and stories.
In this sense, the house has an obvious relationship with my cinema – more as a witness, an observer, and a host to the research and imagination I needed to feel like writing, editing, painting. It is the witness to the constraints when films are finished, to many applications, and to the many disappointments when nothing seems to work.
The relationship between the house and my cinema does not reside so much in the work I developed there, but in my relationship with the inhabited or cinematographic space – which I believe is similar, scenographic and not naturalistic. It is rather a formulation that responds to an immediate impulse. I like it even not knowing why – for the light, color, spatiality, the way in which one can circulate…
And, above all, because from this place – either to be filmed or inhabited – emanates a profound feeling that is addressed to me; that I recognize; that concerns me; that allows me to live, to know and to talk about what I want to talk about.
