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Documentary Film as Committed Art: Interview with Sérgio Tréfaut

2023; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 39; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/port.2023.a918436

2222-4270

Joana Passos,

Brazilian cultural history and politics

Documentary Film as Committed Art:Interview with Sérgio Tréfaut Interview and translation by Joana Passos The Franco-Luso-Brazilian film director Sérgio Tréfaut (1965–) was born in Brazil, but he has been living and working in Portugal for many years. He is an established filmmaker with fourteen films directed and the quality of his work has been repeatedly acknowledged through awards and nominations. His cinema explores the genre of documentary film, revealing deep prior research, keen observation of the world, and a desire to show it in all its complexity. His films usually leave judgement and conclusions to his audience. As David Katz rightly says, Tréfaut 'tells us […] by showing, and not overtly lecturing'.1 This interview, conducted in Lisbon in 2022, seeks to reveal a director whose career exhibits a deep coherence, creating a type of cinema that is committed to bringing an awareness of relevant socio-political and historical issues through an original and surprising visual language. Tréfaut first captured the attention of a wide public with his film Lisboetas [Lisboners] (2004), which focuses on several of the immigrant communities that live in Lisbon. The title seems to ask, ironically, who in fact Lisbon's citizens are. Aren't those immigrants who live and work in Lisbon, and make the city run smoothly with their invisible work, part of that citizenship? Likewise, in Viagem a Portugal [Journey to Portugal] (2011, Golden Taiga Prize), Tréfaut returned to these themes by focusing on a young woman who tries to visit her husband in Portugal, but is met with repeated instances of racism and prejudice because she comes from Eastern Europe and she is married to a black man; eventually she is refused entry by the Portuguese authorities. Tréfaut also directed Treblinka (2016), a title that is itself revealing, and he adapted for cinema the 1958 novel Seara de vento, by Manuel da Fonseca (1911–1993),2 for which he also wrote the screenplay. The film was released with the title of Raiva [Rage] (2018, best film, best adapted screenplay — Sophia Awards.) Recently, Tréfaut hit the headlines again with his film A noiva [Young Bride of the Jihad] (2022), about a young European woman who joins an Islamic terrorist movement, ending up in a prison somewhere in Iraq. True to his signature style, Tréfaut offers no empathy or explanations. It is a film where the [End Page 210] strangeness (and psychological violence) of everything you see speaks for itself. In an interview with the Diário de Notícias,3 the filmmaker stated he did not want his audience to leave the cinema with all the answers. On the contrary, they are challenged to form their own opinions and define their judgement in relation to the themes brought to their consideration. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Still from Viagem a Portugal [Journey to Portugal], dir. by Sérgio Tréfaut (FAUX, 2011) Joana Passos I would like to begin by thanking you for sparing some time for this interview. Then, the first topic I would like to address is the coherence of your work regarding the choice of such themes as memory, emigration… Sérgio Tréfaut: Well, if we're going to talk about coherence, we should start with the first documentary I made, which you may not know… It's called Another Country [Outro País] (1999). It is a film about the Portuguese Revolution,4 as seen by foreign filmmakers and photographers who were in Portugal in 1974–75. I had a passion for photography, and in the early '90s I wanted to organize an exhibition in collaboration with two friends of mine. We wanted to show Sebastião Salgado and the great photographers from Magnum, Sigma, Cipa.5 Little by little, we found out that there were a lot of very important filmmakers who had been in Portugal during the revolution. The exhibition did not go ahead for political reasons, although I had invested a lot in research. It wasn't convenient at the height of Cavaquismo6 to hold an exhibition that celebrated the ideals of transformation that 1974 and 1975 represented...