A Conversation with Paula Gaitán
A selection of Paula Gaitàn's films will be available to watch on Another Screen later in the week.
In 2023, Maria Chiaretti and I ran into each other as I was walking home from a cinema in São Paulo where I’d watched Paula Gaitán’s Luz nos trópicos (Light in the Tropics, 2020). She hadn’t yet read the message I’d sent as I was leaving the cinema: ‘WTF. Just saw Luz nos Trópicos. I can’t believe what Paula has pulled off!’ Laughing at my bewilderment, she reminded me that, a year earlier, she had sent me a similar message from the film’s premiere: ‘My dear, I’ve just seen Paula’s new film. It’s magnificent.’ Neither of us had been able, at first, to formulate anything beyond awestruck superlatives. As we walked together, we tried to fill in the blanks and add precision to those first impressions.
We had felt something similar a few months earlier after watching another of Paula’s films, O canto das amapoulas (2023), a minimalist diary film that blends the voice of the Brazilian-Colombian filmmaker with old recordings of her mother, the Brazilian writer Dina Moscovici, who had recently died. Maria and I had spoken several times about how that film, made by a filmmaker nearing seventy, struck us as being at once fresh and mature, and we agreed that it felt unexpected within Gaitán’s body of work, which we had followed for almost two decades. Like many of the cinephiles of our generation, born in the 1980s, we first encountered Paula’s work through curiosity about Glauber Rocha, a patriarch of modern Brazilian cinema. This is what led us to watch Diário de Sintra (Days in Sintra, 2008). In that film, she revisits the Super 8 films and photographs she took of Rocha, and their two young children during their time in Portugal, shortly before his death.
Diário de Sintra had us believe that we knew Paula’s story: a private life intertwined with the history of modern Brazilian cinema. What came afterwards often seemed to confirm the narrative that Diário had established, or to add new pieces to its puzzle. O canto das amapoulas, however, took us somewhere else again – to a story that predates Sintra, Brazil and Paula’s encounter with cinema: another story of migration, transmission, and of everything that is lost in the passage between borders, languages and words. Above all, O canto das amapoulas is distinct from Paula’s other films structured around memory; it is a dry, controlled work, charged by a subtle emotional undercurrent, set in motion primarily through the manipulation of voices and sound.
But if O canto das amapoulas had already struck us as a major revelation, what were we to make of Luz nos Trópicos, a monumental experimental epic that centers on the Langsdorff Expedition – a scientific mission that travelled some 8,000 miles across Brazil, including the Amazon region, between 1821 and 1829 – and on the invention of photography? Nearly four hours long, with a rarefied dramaturgy, moments of profound visual exuberance, and sound design that could be regarded as a work in its own right, the film possesses a sense of monumental scale that seems at odds with the modest budget on which it was made.
Our shared astonishment clarified for us our need to speak with Gaitán and retrace the threads that led her to make these films. Who was this filmmaker that we thought we’d known so well, but who, so far into her career, had managed to deliver two films – both immense, and yet so different from one another?
Paula Gaitán was born in 1952 in Paris, the daughter of a Colombian father and a Brazilian mother whose Jewish parents had come from Russia and the Czech Republic. When they met in the French capital, her mother was studying cinema and political science, and her intellectual poet father, José Gaitán Durán, was part of the vibrant Latin American literary scene and on the way to becoming one of its key figures.
The family moved back to Colombia while Paula was still young. She lived there until the beginning of the 1970s and studied fine art at university. She left Colombia shortly after meeting Rocha, moving with him first to Brazil, then, soon before his death in 1981, to Portugal. It was with Rocha, too, that Paula – who had been experimenting with photography, drawing and sculpture since university – began to work with film. Her first job in cinema was designing costumes and props for Rocha’s final feature, A Idade da Terra (The Age of the Earth, 1980).
Paula’s beginnings in film were difficult. With two children in her care (and a third child arriving at the end of the 1980s), she took on relatively few projects in the years following Rocha’s death. There were a few shorts, including the now lost Olho d’Água (1982) and a film on the avant-garde artist Lygia Pape (Lygiapape, 1991), as well as the feature-length experimental documentary, Uaká (Sky, 1988), which we only came to know many years later. Uakáis an immersive record of the funeral rites performed by an Indigenous tribe in the Xingu Indigenous Territory. Brazilian Indigenous cinema only began to take shape in earnest in the 1990s, when video workshops were organised in Indigenous communities by groups like Vídeo nas Aldeias.Video nas Aldeias (VNA) was created in Brazil in 1986 with the objective ‘to support the struggles of indigenous peoples to strengthen their identities and their territorial and cultural heritage, through audiovisual resources and a shared production with the indigenous peoples.’ If we exclude earlier, conventionally ethnographic works, made with distinctly colonialist viewpoints, then we can say that Uaká has few predecessors in Brazilian film history (one that comes to mind is Andrea Tonacci’s Conversas no Maranhão [Conversations in Maranhão, 1983]). What is extended in both films is a respectful gesture: one of approximation and hesitant immersion in another reality, made with no attempt to master an unfamiliar body of knowledge. Instead, ample space is left open for encounter and for co-creation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants.
That Brazilian cinephiles of the time were ignorant of Paula’s early works can be explained by the fact that, in the early 1990s, Paula moved back to Colombia with her three children, where she spent years making documentaries for public television, without much news of her or her work reaching Brazil. Since her return to Brazil in 2000 and the making of Diário de Sintra, which travelled to many festivals, Paula has completed more than twenty films – all of them disquieting, radical and free, rooted either in a candid sense of intimacy and curiosity, or emanating a spirit of ambition and confidence that leads us towards the monumental. At an age when many artists tend to slow down, Paula has recently entered the most productive phase of her career, creating a body of work that includes portrait films (or, as she sees them, ‘anti-portrait’ films) of artists, musicians, and activists; sensorial documentaries; music videos; and daringly experimental fiction films. All are remarkable for their visual beauty, formal rigour, and audacious approach to sound.
Over the course of two hot and rainy days in October 2023, we spoke with Paula for more than nine hours. When the time arrived to publish the translation of that conversation, Paula was finalising a film about her friend, the American experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs. She had spoken about him during our first encounter, and he passed away in October 2025, a few short months after the death of his wife and long-time collaborator, Flo Jacobs. This past December, one of us (Patrícia) met with Paula again, this time in snowy New York, to watch a near-final cut of this film, whose working title is ‘About Space and Depth’. The film was shot in New York over the course of a decade, during Paula’s frequent trips to the city. It is a brutally honest essay film about an encounter between two filmmakers who do not share a common language, but connect through a shared visual curiosity.
Watching the film and seeing how Paula and Ken Jacobs found ways of communicating, we were reminded of the dynamics of our interview two years earlier. Paula is not a well-behaved interviewee. She has no pre-rehearsed or ready-made responses for questions she might see coming. She has a way of speaking that begins in one place, then changes direction midway through a sentence or thought. She gets lost in memories and frequently abandons the idea she is in the process of developing in favour of a new one. The meaning is there, in the air – we can sense it – but it isn’t always formulated clearly. Sometimes ideas require many detours before they come together. Translating and editing this interview was therefore like organising the scattered pieces of a puzzle. We hope this puzzle conveys to the reader the singularity and magnitude of Paula’s body of work and mind.
Patrícia Mourão de Andrade and Maria Chiaretti: Could you start from the beginning? Who is Paula Gaitán? Where were you born? What came before cinema?
Paula Gaitàn: I was born on November 18, 1952, during a snowstorm in Paris. I was named after Paul Éluard, who died that same day. My parents met in Paris. My father, José Gaitán Duran, was a poet. He came from a relatively wealthy Catholic family who lived in Cúcuta – in the Colombian countryside, on the border with Venezuela. My mother, Dina Moscovici, was the daughter of Russian and Czech Jewish immigrants who came to Brazil at an early age. They were a modest family. My mother started working very young, got a scholarship to France, and studied at Sciences Po and IDHEC [Institut des hautes études cinématographiques]. She wanted to become a filmmaker. My father was creating the literary magazine Mito, inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s magazine Sur. He was among the first editors to publish writers from the Latin American boom.
I was born in a posh, aristocratic hospital in the Bois de Boulogne, where I think Picasso’s daughter had been born. My parents lived in a Paris banlieue, but my father wanted me to be born in this legendary hospital. And the wealthy Latin American family from that city at the end of the world sent the money for it.
PMA and MC: But you weren’t raised in France, were you?
PG: When I was two or three, we moved to Colombia, but we would often come to Brazil to visit my grandparents. My mother assisted Marcel Camus on the film Black Orpheus [1959]. Then she made a beautiful film in Colombia, Esperando el Milagro [Waiting for the Miracle, 1973]. She was frustrated about the almost absence of cinema in Colombia, and ended up becoming an important theatre director. She always told me: “Oh, you’re not in the movies because of Glauber, it’s because of me.” And I’d reply: “Yes, of course!”
Later, we went back to Europe. My parents had split up, and my mother remarried a philosopher, Francisco Posada. We went first to Paris, then to Germany. On June 21, 1962, my father died in a plane crash in Point-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe. I was ten years old; we had just returned to Colombia. He was living in Paris before his tragic death. I recently learned that he and Alejandra Pizarnik were in a relationship. I found their correspondence because of Mito magazine. There is a rich correspondence between my father and various Latin American intellectuals: Octavio Paz, [Julio] Cortázar, [Mario] Vargas Llosa, and Gabo [Gabriel García Marquez].
PMA and MC: And how did you come to Brazil?
PG: My mother moved back to Brazil in the early 1970s. I wanted to stay in Colombia. I was at university and had a boyfriend. We were both in the MOIR, Movimiento Obrero Independiente y Revolucionario [Revolutionary Independent Workers’ Movement] and I was doing grassroots work with them. I met Glauber Rocha back then. I was at my friend Maria Teresa Viecco’s house, wearing my poncho and long hair, with the strong temper and belligerence I’ve always had. And her mother, Beatriz, arrived with a very handsome man with curly, dark hair. It was Glauber. I was calmly preparing dinner with Maria Teresa. Straight away, a polemic about politics began. He said something about Perón. I, a Maoist, immediately said: “Que Peron, que cosa, que nada, és un nacionalista.” This was the beginning of an endless discussion. I was fourteen years younger than him, quite impatient, and thought he was a bit áburrido [boring]. At a given moment, I asked: “But what do you do? Super 8?” Until the end of his life, whenever we argued, he’d remind me: “You didn’t know who I was; you thought I was a Super 8 filmmaker.” Nothing happened during that meeting. In 1976, I came to Brazil to visit my mother on New Year’s Eve. I met Glauber again. He was returning from his exile in Europe. We fell in love, and I soon moved to Rio.
PMA and MC: Before starting as a filmmaker, your first experience in cinema was as an art director for Glauber Rocha’s A Idade da Terra. You also made several drawings for one of his unproduced scripts, ‘O nascimento dos deuses’ (‘The Birth of the Gods’). What were these collaborations like?
PG: I made drawings for most of the characters in A Idade da Terra and ‘O nascimento dos deuses’. By doing so, I learned decoupage, how to analyse a script technically, and how to create images out of it. Such work was deeply connected to what I was doing in Colombia. I had studied fine arts; I was familiar with all the traditional things: oil painting, engraving, and sculpture. I used to draw, sculpt, and make photogravures. I already had an idea of colour, of chromaticism. And imagination. So, in A Idade da Terra, I brought together these ambitions, focusing on costume design, art direction, and the making of particular objects.
PMA and MC: Can you summarise what you took away from your experience working on A Idade da Terra?
PG: For those who participated in the film, the experience was decisive. Afterwards, it was impossible not to understand your destiny as an artist. A Idade da Terra was a workshop for real-time image-making. Everything was on paper, written down; Glauber knew what he wanted. But the team was creating the sequences together, reinventing the script. Things were alive.
PMA and MC: When Glauber died in 1981, you had two young children, you’d been away from Brazil for a while, and you found yourself in this new reality: restarting life, settling down, and making your first moves towards filmmaking. One might assume that your experience in A Idade da Terra would open doors for you in the Brazilian film industry. But you were very much alone at that time, with few projects. Why was that?
PG: I was non-existent for those people. I wasn’t part of the scene. No one ever invited me to do anything. Besides, after the experience of A Idade da Terra, to collaborate with people I had no dialogue with or admiration for would be pretty banal. So, I made my way slowly. I could have produced many more films then, as I do now. I have not stopped for a minute in twenty years. It’s a curious career. If you draw lines and relate it to the history of Brazilian cinema, it’s a strange project. There were moments of great loneliness, when I felt I didn’t fully belong to the cinema, nor to the art world.
That isn’t to say that there weren’t crucial dialogues. Meeting Lygia Pape, for example, was significant. There was a Rio Arte documentary series on artists. I don’t know how I ended up suggesting a movie about Lygia. She was very generous. I was a teacher, still finding my place, and she opened up a relevant space for me. For the film, we recreated all of her installations; several of them no longer existed. She pushed me forward.
My meetings with Leon Hirszman [a key Cinema Novo filmmaker] and Hélio Oiticica [a Brazilian artist known for his associated with the ‘neo-concrete’ movement] were also significant. Leon saw my first short film, [Olho d’Água], a work I still need to restore, and saw qualities in the project, which motivated me to make more films. Hélio did the same. He saw the scenography I had made for a play which starred Norma Bengell and Ítala Nandi, and loved it. Why am I telling you this? Well, because through small comments and conversations, some important artists have pushed me forward.
PMA and MC: Your first feature, Uaká, was filmed in Xingu with the Kamaiurá people. Today, we have a substantial Indigenous film production, but that wasn’t the case back then. Xingu is also one of the most difficult Indigenous territories to access. What brought you there in 1985-86? What was your relationship with the Indigenous world?
PG: I was at the Brasília Film Festival. There was a journalist catching a plane that was leaving for Xingu. He invited me to come along, and I agreed. I arrived in the middle of the Kuarup [a Xingu funeral ritual]. It was hot; I nearly fainted and ended up in Takumã Kamaiurá’s maloca [hut]. I probably spent the whole party in a hammock recovering from a sunstroke, seeing spiders. And I began to notice the movement of the women inside the maloca, cooking. I realised that the food production was connected to the party, to the common. I kept thinking about this Marxist Zapatista maxim – ‘La tierra es de quien la trabaja’ [The land belongs to those who work it’] – and all that was becoming a total experience between life and death. Everything was powerful. I was able to communicate better there than with everyone in Rio. I thought: ‘I’ve found my place.’ Then I returned to Rio and started working on one idea I had about August, the month when Kuarup is celebrated. And I tried to connect that to the history of Brazil.
PMA and MC: It’s curious that Uaká started in Brasília, with an unexpected invitation. The city is crucial in the film. That was the time of the National Constituent Assembly, the beginning of re-democratisation in Brazil after the civil-military dictatorship. There are two ideas of origin in Uaká: the Xingu territory, with its native peoples, and Brasília, which was also intended to be an origin of Brazilian modernity. The counterpoint between Xingu and Brasília is strong.
PG: That idea caught my attention – the connection between Brasília and the congress. The Kamaiurá people and the people from Xingu had a lot of transit in the city. They would go there to discuss their issues with the ministers. It was an unrestricted dialogue; they entered the offices and everything. I became close to [the Indigenous leader] Ianaculá Rodarte, with whom I’m still friends, and he helped me with the writing. He appears in the film near Granja do Torto [one of the official residencies of the Presidency]. That was in 1985 or 1984. After going to Brasília many times to talk to him, I went back to Xingu to film. The idea was to connect Kuarup, the funeral ritual, with Brazil. It was a rebirth of occult forces. Glauber also talked a lot about these occult forces.
PMA and MC: In Uaká, there are film excerpts from Méliès, who is also a kind of origin, but now of cinema. In another film, Kogi [2009], made with the Indigenous people of Colombia, you include pictures by Muybridge – a return to pre-cinema. Is there a relationship between Indigenous peoples and the origin of cinema for you?
PG: I have always thought that Indigenous cinema is the one most connected to the history of cinema. I felt that when I saw that Maxakali movie, Tatakox [2007]. It was like seeing cinema being born right there in front of me. It was the gaze of the invention of the cinema. I guess I already intended to present this idea of cinema, of a gaze reinventing the history of cinema, in Uaká. Méliès’s moon arrives in Takumã’s eye as if it were cinema itself. I believe Indigenous people are the only born filmmakers.
PMA and MC: The confrontation between these two Brazils, two systems of organising life (the modern project of Brasília and the people of the forest), is reinforced by Uaká’s editing and sound design. You juxtapose the dialogue and the Kamaiurá chants, most of them untranslated, with sounds that evoke the violence of a military-industrial history. At one point, you play the song ‘A face do destruidor’ [‘The Face of the Destroyer’] by the rock band Titãs for the Kamaiurá group who are sitting in the centre of the village. At another, you mix images of the Indigenous people with the sounds of gas bombs.
PG: There’s a lot of construction in Uaká, a lot of mise en scène. For example, we remade the opening scene – the one with movement in the lake, when they walk in plongée – about eight times. Uaká is also a fiction film.
The soundtrack was all reconstructed. I spent more time editing the sound than the image. I did so because I lost a part of the soundtrack. The sound recording guy lost some tapes; they fell into the water. It also took us a long time to create all the layers of the sound design. The film has direct sound, obviously, but it’s all constructed. I used heavy metal music in one scene, for example. The Kamaiurá had massive boomboxes; they listened to everything: pop, rock... I was impressed by how the Kamaiurá related to these different things: we have Ray-Ban sunglasses and the Indigenous masks, rock music and the Kamaiurá chats. These two worlds attract and integrate instead of repelling each other, and that seemed fundamental to the film’s construction. Making this film, I realised that working with sound is the part of filmmaking that excites me the most. I feel like sound experiments are more daring than image experiments.
PMA and MC: What about Uaká’s editing?
PG: Editing is like psychoanalysis. I worked with the film editor Aída Marques. I am verbose, and she is meticulous and economical. So the movie has my associative side, and the precision of her fine cuts. I have a strong memory; I review the material just once and then edit it as if I were painting. It’s a rational yet pictorial process of associating rhythms, colours, images, and combining these elements.
PMA and MC: After Uaká, you were away for a while. You went to Colombia. Why?
PG: It was the Collor era [a period of hyperinflation in Brazil]. I became a mother for the third time, my daughter was young, and I was unmarried and struggling financially. In Colombia, I wouldn’t have to pay rent; I owned a house.
There, all the filmmakers worked in television. And so did I. During this time, I managed to make almost forty films, a children’s series called Planeta Parabolico ('Parabolic Planet'), a couple of documentaries about design called Estetica de la comida ('Aesthetics of Food') and Sexo, Deseo, Amor, Erotismo y Belleza ('Sex, Desire, Love, Eroticism and Beauty'), as well as more independent projects, such as a film about my father, Presença/Ausência [‘Presence/Absence’, 1996]. These films have never left Colombia. Little by little, on my travels, I have managed to recover copies of most of them.
That period was like a university to me. I had to turn in projects regularly and learned to be agile. Television teaches you how to work with a small team and at a fast pace. I used to take my children to the studio to work overnight; Ava was thirteen, and Maíra was very young. Eryk, the eldest, started working as an assistant there and then went to study cinema in Cuba.
PMA and MC: You returned to Brazil at the beginning of the 2000s and made Diário de Sintra, in which you revisit material that you had recorded 28 years earlier, when you lived with Glauber and your young children in Portugal. Why did you go back to this material at that time?
PG: I shot a lot of Super 8 when I lived in Sintra. I photographed a lot of nature, the children, Glauber. He had an aura. The photos are beautiful, and one of them turned out to be central to the film. It’s a pretty revealing photo of a moment at the end of his life – his gaze is sweet and, at the same time, melancholic. In Sintra, I placed the still photos against the landscape. I experimented with photos emerging from a riverbed, on the surface of water, sprouting from the earth, as if the image could come to life. I can’t say why, but these photos are the protagonists. It goes beyond making films with photos, like Chris Marker does in La Jetée [1962] or Agnès Varda does in her Havana film [Salut les Cubains, 1963] – those are more of a reflection on cinema’s ‘24 frames’. My film is something else. It’s an idea of working with a kind of transmutation, something alchemical. The photo is reborn from its insertion into nature.
PMA and MC: You treat the photo like a body.
PG: Like a body, exactly. But I’m not depicting anyone’s death. The photos become still lifes.
PMA and MC: You still haven’t commented on why you went back to these memories at this point.
PG: Because I had already made other films, I had proved I wasn’t an opportunist. I was rigorously against taking a shortcut; I had to follow my path and find my language. I would never make a movie about Glauber’s story and death. It had to be an individual process, honest and ethical. Despite Glauber being fundamental, I’ve consciously detached myself from him.
Diário de Sintra is an essential film because it’s an anti-portrait. It’s like: let’s talk about cinema, not about Glauber. It isn’t about Glauber, it’s about me, like my other films are. When a writer writes, they are influenced by their life story, art history, little stories, anything and everything. All these totalities traverse the work of some artists. Diário de Sintrais not a film made by Glauber’s widow.
PMA and MC: We like this anti-portrait idea. You have made film portraits of actresses, filmmakers, musicians, intellectuals. Are these all anti-portraits?
PG: They are projects detached from their subjects. I see them as dialogues between artists. They always come from a relationship between two people. For example, my film with Arrigo Barnabé [Ostinato, 2021] is an encounter, a conversation, in which I express myself. I realised I was making several portraits in which I had this view of the other person and put myself on an equal footing with them. So it’s a kind of irreverent documentary that bothers people because I eventually talk more than the interviewee. In Sutis interferências [Subtle Interferences, 2016], there’s Arto [Lindsay] and the music, though it’s not his music, pure and simple; I interrupt and fragment it. I add pauses that sound like mistakes but aren’t. There’s also an almost analytical desire to get to his body, his anatomy. It’s not the content or theme that interests me in cinema; it’s the material world and how to deal with it.
PMA and MC: You’ve made a lot of film portraits for television. What draws you to this genre? Do you like the dialogue and the opportunity to establish relationships with the interviewees?
PG: I had a project called Resistentes [‘Resistants’] in which I would meet with people older than me: Éliane Radigue, Antônio Negri, Agnès Varda, and Renato Berta. It was supposed to be a show about restless artists and intellectuals – people who resisted trends and weren’t tied to a specific movement. I admire artists like that. The show only had two seasons, one with characters from Europe and the other from Brazil. In Europe, I filmed Ariane Mnouchkine, Radigue, Negri, Varda and Berta. I wanted to do an American season, too. I even filmed Yvonne Rainer, Matana Roberts, and Ken Jacobs, but Canal Brasil wasn’t interested. Then, I filmed the Brazilians Zé Celso [Martinez Corrêa], Sônia Guajajara, Jean-Claude Bernardet, Alice Ruiz, Arrigo Barnabé, and Negro Léo – this material made my feature film about him possible.
A portrait that I really want to finish is Ken Jacobs’s. It has been the most laborious movie I’ve ever made. It’s a crazy project and the simplest. Since I met Ken at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2008, I’ve been fascinated with him. The Jewish issue started to return to me through him. Ken brought back this memory of what being Jewish is like; he speaks in a very particular way. His way of being and humour profoundly resonate with me. Ken has always been very approachable and generous; we built a friendship. I reach out to him every time I go to New York City. Once, I took the camera as a pretext to meet him and proposed a walk through the Anthology Film Archives. I wanted to discuss the cinema I’m most passionate about, American experimental film – Marie Menken, Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith. I met Jonas Mekas because Ken introduced us. I can’t picture the world without Ken. And I’ve been struggling to finish editing this film. It’s hard. It’s full of delicacy, of things that perhaps one can’t say publicly; it has a lot of edges. I want it to be precise and fine-tuned to avoid being irresponsible.
PMA and MC: Shortly after your first film portraits, you made Exilados do Vulcão [The Volcano Exiles, 2013], your first narrative feature. For the first time, you directed actors, and worked with a larger team, including the celebrated cinematographer Inti Briones. The film has remarkable art direction, meticulously composed scenes, and a strong presence of the landscape. Until Exilados do Vulcão, your work had a sense of modesty and intimacy; the camera was close to things and bodies. This ambitious, exuberant film is a significant change in your cinema.
PG: Exilados do Vulcãois a film marked by my awe of Minas Gerais. It is a beautiful Apollonian film, mainly because of Inti Briones’s cinematography and my editing in collaboration with Fábio Andrade. The film’s international reception was terrible due to its non-conformance with what festivals expected from a Brazilian or Latin American cinema. It probably suffered the consequences of being an autonomous and un-demagogic project. I feel there was little generosity in understanding a project that perhaps, in the hands of a woman director from somewhere else, would have toured the world. There’s no worse offense than being criticised because the film is beautiful. A lot of people attacked me because the movie was beautiful. And I said, “Fine, let’s switch gears. I will make an unmixed film with a handheld camera, out-of-focus, sharp cuts, radical sounds. Let’s move to another language. Let’s see what you think of that.”
PMA and MC: Are you referring to Noite [Night, 2014] and Sutis Interferências?
PG: Arto [Lindsay] told me not to mix Sutis Interferências. For Noite, I chose to do it this way. Noite is a documentary about a historic moment in Rio de Janeiro’s nightlife. I got to know the music venue Audio Rebel, because of my daughter Ava and Negro Léo, my son-in-law. I was already into electroacoustic music. Sutis Interferências is from around the same time. I took the movie to a sound designer, who said, “I can’t do anything. This is a tragedy, it’s all wrong, full of noise, dirt.” I said, “Well, I get it. It’s all wrong, but help me equalise it, at least a little.” He said he’d do it but didn’t want his name credited. During the film premiere at the Festival do Rio, the curator asked if I was sure I wanted to screen the film. I said yes. We bought 200 earplugs and offered them to the audience at the theatre’s entrance.
I didn’t use them. I like the shock of this music beating in my chest. You have two ways of relating to it: either you run away, or you stay still and become a lizard. As soon as you are paralysed, your mind starts to move. It is a matter of sensitivity.
PMA and MC: Why did the sound designer think everything was wrong?
PG: Because the movie deals with noise, it might be implied that I haven’t cleaned up the material. I filmed everything with a Z1 [Sony HVR-Z1] camera; I had no sound equipment, no microphone, the sound input was a tiny hole in the camera. I decided to embrace the dirty sound. I thought it was interesting. On top of direct sound, there are many sound layers mixed in, things I found on the internet. My single wish was to avoid over-manipulation. I wanted the sound design to be abrupt, violent, tragic. Despite the high volume, the audience doesn’t get a hiss in the ears; it’s more about the density.
PMA and MC: Five years after Noite, you released Luz nos trópicos, which returns to the same kind of compositional interest in relation to the landscape that was so criticised in Exilados do Vulcão. Luz nos trópicos is an immense film of staggering beauty, but with a sparse narrative. How would you describe it?
PG: It’s a song, a long poem, nourished by musings and historical, ethnographic, philosophical and literary sources. It’s like a history of the world, of the world that extends to the Americas. But it also includes many elements of my life. I believe Luz nos trópicos brings together several pieces of research.
PMA and MC: Can you comment a little on the genesis of Luz nos trópicos?
PG: It began in 2002 with a desire to research light, the clash between European and American light, and a desire to connect it to the history of photography. My idea was to film in France, at the house of Nicéphore Niépce [a nineteenth-century pioneer of photography]. There was also the Langsdorff Expedition, on which Hercule Florence went as a draughtsman.The Langsdorff Expedition (1825–29) was a major scientific journey led by the Russian naturalist Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff through Brazil’s interior, which brought together scientists and artists to document its landscapes, peoples, flora, and fauna. Its journals, drawings, and maps became one of the most important bodies of documentation on nineteenth-century Brazil. Florence was a researcher, a scientist and inventor, and a key but little recognised figure in the discovery of photography.Florence invented something close to photography in Brazil, three years before Daguerre (but six years after Nicéphore Niépce), using the negative/positive matrix, which is still in use. In his notes from 1834, he referred to his process, in French, as photographie, at least four years before the word photography was coined in English. He was a contemporary of Niépce. But the stories of the people on the expedition, what happened to them, were of little interest to me. I was interested in the research, the diaries, and how the expedition managed to make contact with Indigenous peoples through the confluence of rivers.
PMA and MC: Niépce and Florence disappear in the film. However, the origins of the technical image remain there, for instance, in that flickering Super 8 image of the horse spinning in circles.
PG: We conducted a lot of research on daguerreotypes and the history of photography, but still only glossed the subject. One example is that part in which we built a four-metre-high pyramidal camera obscura. We built the camera with the lens on top in [the state of] Mato Grosso. The actor Carloto Cotta appears to manipulate the lens and then positions the photographic paper, and we see the inverted image.Gaitàn built a huge camera obscura in a meadow. It had architectural dimensions, and it was built following the specifications of the original nineteenth-century device. It had a pyramidal structure, with the lens placed on the top of it. At some point, we see the actor inside the camera, spreading sheets of photographic paper on the floor, where the light falls. The scene with Carolina Virguez walking through the countryside was created on that camera, similar to the first experiments with photography.
PMA and MC: Thirty years after Uaká, you returned to Xingu. Why?
PG: I wanted to film with the Bororo, the people who inspired Claude Levi-Strauss’s Mythologiques [1964]. There were some connections between Florence’s route and his. The Bororo village was in Mato Grosso. We realised it would be difficult to film there due to the strong presence of evangelicals in the area. I had already worked with the Kamaiurá from the Upper Xingu, and I knew the region and its difficulties. I was also friends with the filmmaker Takumã Kuikuro, and the Kuikuro people invited me.
I don’t mean to brag, but there is something special about coming from an impoverished filmmaking background. Thanks to my experiences of making a ‘poor’ cinema – working with minimal budgets, and without resources – I developed an ability to work very quickly; I’m not attached to an unattainable ideal. In the end I gave up on the idea of filming the Bororo. It was a matter of urgency. I don’t cheat. I wasn’t trying to make the Kuikuro look like Bororo.
PMA and MC: In Luz nos trópicos, two journeys run in parallel without exactly intersecting: a 19th-century expedition through the tropical landscapes of the Brazilian countryside, supposedly the Langsdorff Expedition, and that of the Indigenous character, who seems to be making a reverse journey, in the present day. He is leaving New York for his Kuikuro village – a journey of return.
PG: It’s the story of Ianuculá Rodarte, the son of Sapaim [a kamaiurá pajé or shaman], whom I met while making Uaká. For some reason, when he was young, he was sent to Rio de Janeiro to live with a family of dentists. He returned to his people only when he was sixteen and became an important leader in the Upper Xingu region.
PMA and MC: The film has many contrasts: Xingu and New York, the forest and the snow. Seeing the Kuikuro character in that icy landscape inevitably evokes Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North [1922]. Was Flaherty also a part of your research?
PG: Flaherty fascinates me. Nanook also inspired Luz nos trópicos. I’ve always been intrigued by the journey of Nanook. So when I went to the Bororo village, they gave me a cue for the ice. I asked the cacique [the religious and ‘political’ leader of an Indigenous community], “How do you imagine the world far away, in the city?” He said that everything that wasn’t the village was another country for him: “An icy, chaotic and hermetic world.” So, I connected this with Nanook. I wanted to contrast suffocating heat and frozen ice, and to open up a new space for human history.
PMA and MC: Water paving the way for human history is fascinating. It reminds us of your film É rocha e rio, Negro Leo [Riverock, 2020], which has river in its title.
PG: É rocha e rio is an entirely different movie, but it has a profound dialogue with Luz nos trópicos. They are sister projects made simultaneously. Both are traversed by an idea of music, sound, river, fluidity. Leo also talks about the history of the world. Each film is a perspective on history, two worlds’ history. É rocha e rio is almost a manifesto, and Luz nos trópicos links the Indigenous issue to the formation of the other peoples who inhabited the Americas.
Going back to Glauber, I found in his work an inspiration and freedom to make the history of the Americas into a great fresco. I already knew the movie wouldn’t fit into two hours; it would expand. Expanded cinema, rhizomatic, fluid, connected by rivers. The experience of filming became the language itself. While filming, I often imagined the editing. I was mentally sculpting the film.
PMA and MC: In the last part of this sculpture, there is a contrast that intrigues us. Luz nos trópicos is an epic, deeply constructed, and grandiose film, but you move it towards a diaristic and intimate approach at the end. You film your daughter Maíra in her art studio in New York, which doesn’t fit into the narrative. Why was including these images in the film important?
PG: Because these images – Maíra working, sculpting – were part of my daily life. Much of it was filmed with a loose, sometimes out-of-focus, handheld camera, as if it were an action painting. There’s a lot of Super 8. I wanted to approach the material, the film, as if it had different textures, layers of superimposed oil painting. Luz nos trópicos is structured in three parts; the last was the first I edited. In Diário de Sintra, there’s a moment at which the image begins to break down and shatter. There’s also this idea of building a work and then destroying it. You can do this in cinema: start with something more narrative and suddenly turn it into something else, or into nothing at all.
PMA and MC: What about the sound in Luz nos trópicos?
PG: I worked on the sound design, as I did for Uaká, except this time I edited the sound directly in the editing room. Noite, Sutis Interferências, the clip for Elza Soares’s song ‘Mulher do fim do mundo’ [‘The Woman at the End of the World’, 2007], Riverock, The Path is Made by Walking [2021], and Luz nos trópicos are all films that I edited on my own. Marcos Lopes da Silva did a meticulous direct sound inspired by Florence’s research on zoophony [a method of transcribing the vocalization of animals] for Luz nos trópicos. He jerry-rigged a microphone that recorded different sounds. Thiago Bello also worked on the mixing. It was a sea of sounds. You might say that the sounds are like algae, like fish from different species. When you look at the film’s timeline, you see all the animals across these different tracks and curves. It’s like a symphony immersed in a lake. This idea of symphonic sound is very much my thing.
PMA and MC: O canto das amapolas is a very personal film. It features a Paula that we haven’t seen before. You had already included your children and Glauber in your films. Here, that part of your life is almost absent. You talk alone, with your mother’s voice, about a time before you, from the daughter’s point of view. It seems like a late coming-of-age film.
PG: Getting to the mother is always more complicated. Because, for me, the mother is the essence. And the film only has her voice; it doesn’t have her image. Perhaps the film is a way of getting closer to the maternal voice that accompanied me during my time in Germany. Finding that voice and transforming suffering into a creation act is healing. Diário de Sintra is like that, too, except it took me longer to understand how to create without emulating false emotions. Glauber was a public person; my mother was not. Making films out of tragic or painful material is dangerous. Perhaps, deep down, many films in this genre want to build immediate rapport with the audience. I tend to distance myself from these films.
PMA and MC: The film is austere, mournful, and minimalist.
PG: Arriving at this austerity was a profound feeling, also because my mother was very austere. Through this film, I reached artistic maturity, a point of sophistication.
PMA and MC: O canto das amapolas is a film about the passing on of knowledge and forgetting; you are trying to recover your family’s history, its displacements, and the diaspora. In the process, you identify yourself more and more with Judaism. We get to know you are Jewish only in this film. What does Judaism mean to you?
PG: Judaism is inside you. It may be my first homeland, my first place. It has become more evident over time. We weren’t a practicing Jewish family, but I arrived at this place getting older. I don’t know why. A wandering people. Maybe this is the most significant connection with my life. I’m a wanderer.
PMA and MC: You seem to need to leave Brazil to make your most personal films. In Diário de Sintra, you go to Portugal and Germany. Why must you leave the “light of the tropics” to talk about Paula?
PG: Because I find myself the way I am far away. Maybe it frees me up to be anyone. Over the years, you also feel freer. No one will tame me; no one will limit my imagination and creative freedom. I’m going to serve the aesthetics of dream.
I’m planning, though, a movie that will be shot entirely in my place. This idea of the house has reverberated since my mobility issue. I keep looking at this house where I live; it reminds me of other houses I have had. There will be no character, just space. It will be a return to the visual arts, installation, with objects only.
PMA and MC: Do you feel like a Brazilian filmmaker?
PG: Not even Colombian. I feel foreign wherever I go. I have no sense of belonging. At the same time, I feel very welcomed by the younger generation. I advocate for this intergenerational dialogue, a dialogue of equals. I feel like a Latin American woman.
PMA: Three years ago, you, Maria and I met on a summer afternoon in São Paulo and spoke at length about your work. Now the two of us meet again – this time in snowy New York – to watch a cut of your film about Ken Jacobs, provisionally titled ‘About Space and Depth’. In the interview we did back then, you said you couldn’t imagine life without Ken. So I’d like to begin by asking what it was like for you to finish the film after his death, and why it took you so long to complete it. If I’m not mistaken, you’ve never worked on a film for such an extended period of time.
PG: Ken is immense. I think that he’s on the same level as Godard. So, I felt a great sense of responsibility with this film. It took a long time for me to understand what the film’s path would be, how to speak about Ken’s work, and how to place myself in relation to it and to him. In the end, I don’t think it’s a film about Ken. It’s an encounter and an exchange.
I began editing the film soon after the first time I filmed him, in 2014. But I realised I needed more material, since Flo didn’t appear in what I had shot. So, I went back to film again in 2017 or 2018. Then I went through a period without filming, because I was working on Luz nos trópicos. I would still see Ken whenever I came to New York, but I wouldn’t film him. Sometimes I took photos, and some of those ended up in the film. I also shot a lot on Super 8. I saw him often at Anthology Film Archives. Ken, Flo and I would meet there and walk a lot in Chinatown. They came to see Uaká when it screened in New York, and the three of us watched his films together at MoMA. I took up filming more consistently again in 2021 and continued every year until 2024, when I shot the film’s final sequence in a park.
PMA: You finished a first cut after Ken and Flo’s deaths, but you don’t mention their deaths in the film.
PG: Life and death are present throughout the film. Ken constantly talks about death. But I don’t like to name death, ever. And I think doing so would be manipulative; I don't want the spectator to have this kind of emotional attachment. The film isn’t about their deaths or their aging. The film is the result of searching for a way to communicate with Ken and Flo, especially with Ken. Flo and I could communicate quite directly as one woman to another.
PMA: That's interesting. The film is dedicated to her and not to Ken, even though it’s about him. There’s a beautiful moment when Ken says that he likes your way of filming because you’re always looking towards the periphery, and I wonder: was Flo the periphery to which you were looking?
PG: Flo is fundamental to the film. If it weren’t for her, there would be no film. Even though she was often silent, she always encouraged our meetings and made sure they happened. She was very welcoming and caring. She was attentive to detail in everything she did. If I wanted a coffee, tea… I think she even put flowers out for me. They were beautiful. She gave warmth to the meetings. She even helped produce a few scenes.
PMA: It was unsettling to see her health decline from one year to the next. At times, she appears very fragile.
PG: I tried to avoid using scenes in which she appears unwell, but sometimes it was impossible to cut. And it was very touching to see Ken's tenderness towards her. I think it says something about the dynamic between the two of them. For instance, there’s a moment when he’s saying very harsh, pessimistic things about the future of the planet and of the United States, then he takes her hand and says, “I’m sorry”. He was lamenting that she had to witness his pessimism, which was so beautiful. I took great care with the images of Flo, but I wasn’t going to take her out of the film. I wasn't. That would have been cruel, too. She has so much dignity, and that dignity is so much bigger than her physical decline. It’s true, she was sick. But I’m ill too, and we’re all aging.
PMA: I was struck to learn how many times you were all together, given the significant language barrier. You barely speak English, and you don’t understand everything Ken and Flo are saying, and they have difficulty with your accent and pronunciation. Yet you maintained this exchange for so long. Even though the film involves a lot of talking, it feels like you and Ken found something that went beyond language, something rooted in the dynamics of filming. He’s observing and investigating you as much as you’re observing him with these very close shots. The two of you are fascinated by the way each other looks and frames the world. Yet it is still a kind of talking picture. What was it like to make the film without understanding what Ken was saying? What was it like to edit the film without having a transcript of the dialogue to hand?
PG: It was hard, but I understand more English than I speak. I intuited what he was saying. During the shoot, I would ask for help from my cameraman, Peter Azen, and sometimes he would translate for me. I feel that I sometimes come across as very childish. I was saying “It’s so beautiful” all the time. I obviously could have taken this out so I wouldn’t seem so foolish, but I chose to leave it – it’s not stupidity on my part. In those moments, I reveal myself as a person. I don’t want to pretend that I’m smart or dumb, cultured or uncultured. That’s me onscreen, crazy or not, and I want that to be there.
PMA: There’s a very powerful scene in the film where you’re not allowed to enter the Anthology Film Archives. It's probably before the cinema opens: someone comes to open the door for Ken, Flo enters, and then they don't let you in. Flo even tries, unsuccessfully, to argue on your behalf. As I was watching, I kept thinking: here we have an experimental filmmaker denied entry to the great institutional home of experimental cinema… When Anthology was founded in 1970, it marked a moment of institutionalisation and canonisation of American experimental film. I think this scene says a great deal about the current state of American, or maybe New York, experimental filmmaking. It has turned towards its own past, towards a kind of self-celebrating canonisation, but it is unable to open itself up to what is outside. I wonder how that American scene will receive your film. How do you see your film making its way into the world?
PG: Just a few weeks ago, I got to meet Azazel Jacobs [Ken and Flo’s son, who is also a filmmaker]. He invited me to screen the film in April as part of a series in tribute to Ken. He hasn’t seen it yet, and he told me he didn’t feel ready to see it, but he still wanted to invite the film because he knows his parents liked me. I froze up. I don’t think the film fits into a tribute series. It isn’t an homage to Ken. And I told him he had to see the film first, because even I don’t yet know what it is. I said, “I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but you can’t programme it before you see it. It’s not a documentary about Ken, it's not a homage to Ken. It’s a film made with love, about an encounter between two people.”
I don’t really know what the film’s fate is right now. For me, the most important thing was to finish it. I didn’t want something to happen to me and for the film to be left incomplete, because there’s a lot of love in it.
