I will I will I will

At Cinemateca, I enter the small screening room and I’m sucked into a time machine. Facing the short film I directed twenty-seven years ago, I remember so much future. All the movies I have yet to make, goddamn.

Cinemaamor, it’s called. Sixteen minutes of bright colors, musical playfulness, cinephile quotes and — actors, actors, actors under this tilted Lisbon light. It’s so crazy. I had forgotten how crazy it was. And so innocent. Innocent enough to believe in the beauty of city façades, in the deep blue of this country’s sky, in creation as a permanent beginning.

When my first book came out — a small collection of stories called Para averiguar do seu grau de pureza (pardon my Portuguese) —, I was twenty-two years old. I remember being asked if I was not afraid of, some day in the future, feeling like I had to disown such a precocious literary attempt. I don’t know what I answered then. But, the other day, in that Cinemateca dark room, I had the exact opposite sensation. I saw how much I have to learn from that kid’s joyful bravery. That kid who threw himself into a flick with a dance scene in a hospital corridor, a failed suicide that becomes a comedy routine, a character that exists in order to look at the camera as it pulls away, a head that becomes a city, a city that becomes a face in a close-up. And it was amazing seeing those young actors. Seeing them now, tinged by the ghosts of everything they have done since in theater plays and movies, all those unspeakable layers of retrospective imagination: António Simão, Sylvie Rocha, Manuel Wiborg, Rita Durão, Bruno Bravo, Pedro Carraca. And João Bénard da Costa! A great cinema philosopher, a true master, playing the doctor in this kid’s little movie!

That short film reminded me the cinema I have yet to make, and will make. I’ll start, for example, by project Paulo. A feature about a filmmaker who wants to make a film about Paul of Tarsus, or Saint Paul, for our time — to make an anti-anti-immigration work of art. To do so, he takes San Paolo, Pasolini’s unproduced screenplay; he takes São Paulo, Teixeira de Pascoaes’ novel-like biography; he takes Saint Paul, Alain Badiou’s essay on the foundation of universalism. A movie to speak in the language of images about that revolutionary figure, the first one saying all men are equal. Cinema as the world’s reverse shot. Cinema as a counter-world. To do this, I want to have the same actors and others I got to know on the way; I want comedy and songs; I want rigorous framing composition and space for every happy chance. I’m well aware that the film-subsidy selection boards haven’t shown a tremendous interest in my ideas, but I will make it. I will I will I will.

Here I am forgetting commas, trying to write my way through. I’m like that man I saw some days ago, at the Berlinale’s entrance, with a cardboard sign saying: “I need money to make a film!” If some patron of the arts is reading this letter, please send me a message. Yes, please, will you?

Why, you ask?

Well, because the other day I remembered the future.