Tiana (17) interviewed Paraguayan filmmaker Marcelo Martinessi who directed The Heiresses. His debut feature screened at the 65th Sydney Film Festival and was awarded the prestigious Sydney Film Prize, out of a selection of 12 Official Competition films.
The Heiresses was also the winner of the Berlinale Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize for opening new perspectives and the Silver Bear for Best Actress for Ana Brun.
What inspired you to write the screenplay for The Heiresses?
Well, the work I’ve done before wasn’t originally mine. So when I sat down in front of a sheet of paper thinking about my very first original screenplay, what immediately came to my mind were the conversations I heard as a child. These were mainly the conversations amongst women in my family, such as my mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, great aunty. In Latin America you grow up surrounded by a lot of women. This is the way I discovered the world. So I started writing those dialogues.
I was sure that my first film was going to be woman-centered. I admire directors like Fassbinder, Todd Haynes and their female characters. But I also thought the complexity of my society would be better seen through women stories.
You wrote it five years back. What was the process like getting it produced?
I come from a country where there is no film funding yet – there is no Film Institute. So we had to make sure we had a very strong script before starting the financial process. The resources came first from Germany, Brazil and Uruguay, then from Norway. France joined early in the process but the funding came later. It was a lucky project, we had a very good reception from most funding bodies, which is quite unusual, given the huge quantity and quality of scripts out there. But still, the main achievement for me was to find the right partners: Seba Peña in Paraguay and (in other five countries) co-producers that understood and liked the project, because they would defend it with a lot of passion.
This film is a deviation from your previous path of documentary-style filmmaking focusing on political issues and human rights. How did that come about?
I was working as director of the first Paraguayan Public Television. It was created in 2010 but disappeared two years later, during the 2012 coup d’état. That moment provoked an internal crisis for me. I was desperate about what was happening in Paraguay. I was upset with the petit bourgeoisie (the class I come from), because I felt they supported the coup and the breaking-up of a political process that was important for my country. It was only then, that I realised my previous work, about human rights and political injustice was very militant, and for that reason, completely ignored by the ruling class. And they were the people I needed to create a dialogue with.
So having all this in mind, I decided to bring the camera closer to my truth, to the reality I come from, and try to start a new process of understanding the world. This world was the one I grew up in and – through this story that has a metaphorical component – I also wished to channel the sense of oppression that I always felt in my country.
I don’t know if that answers your question, I could talk about it for hours. Even though it doesn’t have an obvious approach to political matters, I think the film approaches the mechanism of protection / oppression that exists in authoritarian regimes such as the one that ruled Paraguay for decades. It’s about a woman who is protected and oppressed by her partner, but also about her journey to freedom. In that sense, it’s a lot more metaphorical than my previous work, but I believe it still has the potential to create a dialogue within a society that hardly thinks about the consequences of political regimes in everyday life.
What is your creative process like for preproduction and when you are conceptualising an idea? Do you draw up scenes or do you work on fleshing through a script?
In this case, many of the characters and situations that are in the film are inspired by people that I know and voices I’ve heard. So I wrote many ideas, images, dialogues and then I put them together.
The process was slow. I had this thing that every day when I would write, I would go from the very first page and read the whole script again. Even if I was at the last scene I would read it all before I started writing again. It isn’t the easiest method, but it helped me, somehow.
And then in the preproduction process the first actress I chose was Chela (Ana Brun) because I needed to cast a woman who had the ability to perform without so many words, and portray a journey without the need of a lot of dialogue. After I found Chela, she aided me to cast the rest of the film. Every single actress that had a relationship with her, for example, Chiquita (Margarita Irun), Angy (Ana Ivanova), Pati the maid (Nilda Gonzalez), were all cast with Chela. The casting process was quite organic to the way we work. I like casting but we don’t do open calls. I knew that Chela had to be a woman from the upper class. This was Ana Brun’s first film but I knew she was going to be able to understand the character because she comes from that segment of society – she doesn’t need to perform too much. She knows the difference between distances and voice tone when talking to a maid, to a neighbour or to her partner. It feels very natural. A lot of the unseen and unspoken things that are in the film have a heavyweight in the story.
I cast around 12 women in order to find Chela and then also the same amount to find Chiquita. And as for Angy, we needed someone able to awake some sensual feelings in the protagonist. I remember Ana Brun (Chela) telling me after the first time we had a chat with Ana Ivanova (Angy) – “she makes me feel something physical and reassuring but at the same time uncomfortable when she approaches. Maybe it’s the way she talks”. So it was this process of discovering the rest of the characters with Ana Brun that helped us both a lot during preproduction.
I really trust my team. I had the same art director and the same director of photography for more than a decade on my short films. They comprehended very well what I wanted to achieve. It was a matter of making the right decisions and understanding that we need to work together.
And your neighbour is the maid in your film?
Yes! She is a domestic worker in the house of a friend that lives next door to my house in Paraguay. I always liked her face – she had this amazing expression and build. I thought of Chela going through all these hard situations and how she would need to go to a safe place. This woman [the domestic worker] had a body and charm that made Chela feel very comfortable. For example, the foot massage was not a part of the script originally but because she does this to her boss, we added it. We created these situations together. There were a lot of things in the film that came through rehearsing and discussion with the characters. The script just gave us a starting point.
I found it really interesting that you portrayed two lesbians, one of whom comes to rediscover her sexual desires. What kind of research did you do writing from women’s perspective?
As I mentioned before, some characters are loosely based on people around me. And I also feel that Ana Brun was a huge help, because even when she wouldn’t connect directly to the sexual orientation of the character, she would strongly connect and understand her desire. When you are from a country where there are not a lot of trained actors for cinema, they offer on set something different – they put their humanity and they put their genuine feelings.
I wouldn’t be able to write and direct this story about women over sixty if I didn’t have the chance to get a lot of contribution from the actresses. The whole idea was in the script but I think they are the ones who gave these characters credibility.
You once said you are interested in homophobia within the lesbian world. What’s the LGBTQ movement like in Paraguay? So with the strong Catholic presence within the country.
I was interested in this generation of lesbian women around 60s/70s that grew up under all the oppression of the dictatorship and have internalised the homophobia of the system. There is a dialog in the film when – talking about a girl – Chiquita says: “Ah! the one that looks like a boy”. I was really defending that line during the writing, shooting and editing process. It was important for me to show that they are not militant and that they are not modern lesbian women fighting for their rights. They are from a society where they had to grow up with borrowed identities, trying to be themselves but also playing someone else at the same time because they weren’t fully accepted by their own people.
Paraguay has still a lot of homophobia. The Senate approved an important National honour for the film last April. But when we went to receive it, more than half of the senators left the session. And a female senator yelled at Ana Brun for promoting lesbianism. I wasn’t really aware about how rude our authorities could be. I’ve travelled and lived abroad during the last few years, so was quite surprised to find out the level of ‘narrow-mindedness’ in the country elite. If a senator does that and gets away with it, you can easily imagine what might be the experiences of the LGBTQ community in Paraguayan everyday life.
Would you be able to give insight on the current developments within the film industry in your country.
Marcelo: We had what we call our “years of darkness”, decades with no film production. There was a dictator who financed (in 1978) an epic propaganda feature length film and there were some independent productions every once in a while (for example the medium length feature ‘El Pueblo’ in 1969). But only in the last 10/15 years have we started having a bit more films – a sort of boom of Paraguayan cinema. We cannot compare ourselves to neighbouring countries like Argentina, Brazil or Bolivia, where they had film institutes that developed and consolidated an industry decades ago. Only now we can say that there are between three and five feature films made per year in Paraguay. Maybe one or two of those would travel outside the country to European festivals. These are huge independent efforts, because the lack of funding still makes it very difficult to work.
With limited access to films in your youth – what films made an impact on you?
Grey Gardens, wow – I loved that film. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf. Many classic films. I really enjoyed films that had strong women as protagonist. All the Fassbinder films especially The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant. But those films I only had the chance to discover as a young man travelling to New York or other places. In Paraguay we had very limited access to books or cinema during the dictatorship. So my journey of discovery started in my 20’s – when if living in another culture it would have started at 10 or 11. Anyway, I keep many beautiful memories of that period of falling in love with Latin American writers or filmmakers as well as with Cassavetes, Dreyer, Dostoevsky, Woolf, Wilde. I was 22 or 23.
Did you feel that you had to consume as much as possible?
Yes! As the son of a lawyer, I grew up in a house mainly stocked with law and history books. The set of fiction was quite limited, maybe only 30/40 books. It was reduced but a good start considering the political conditions at that time. I remember in my early twenties I was eager to absorb more and more. So, especially when traveling outside Paraguay, I would spend hours and hours in bookshops and at the cinema.
What are you working on next?
There are some ideas I have in mind. Despite the fact I haven’t really had time to rest. We finished the film right in time for Berlin. After that, we had the premier in Paraguay and then several presentations of the film abroad. I feel I would like to stop at some point for a couple of months and develop some scenes and ideas that I have in mind. If I could choose I would always like to work in Paraguay with stories from Paraguay because I feel that is my strength. It is where I come from and I understand the society. I don’t feel like I’m one of those directors who can just grab actors, grab a script and make a film. For me a film has to do with an internal process and that internal process has only been possible for me in Paraguay, so far.
And it’s good for you to be telling those stories for us as well.
Yes, hopefully.
Thank you so much for your time.
It’s been a pleasure to talk to you.