"[...] There are some things you don’t say. But if I don’t know it, I can invent it. That’s what we do! Even when trying to find a cure for the coronavirus. I think there is a sense of that in the film: sometimes you have to invent things in order for them to exist".
"[...] Thinking about death made me think about our relationship with nature. Because in nature, it’s something that just happens – death connects us all. Human beings, animals, plants. So is the experience of loss, as the elephants bury their own, too! Nature gave me hope, mostly because of its cycles. You have autumn, winter, but then comes the spring, and it feels like you are born again. One day, I was just staring at the leaves, thinking how similar they look to our skin, to what we are. I could relate to it so easily and make all these parallels – also between the funeral of the bird [shown in the film] and what we normally do when somebody passes away. I don’t know if you remember the first time you realised we are going to die. It can be quite shocking. Thinking about the bird makes these kids think about their father, but in that moment, they are surrounded by nature. That gives them some consolation, I think.".
"[...] As with all films about families, little secrets that were not shared come out. But this was not just that. This was about mothers and the refusal to have them die twice... [H]er film may not be perfect as a film, but it is as perfect as life"
No podría sacar ninguna conclusión del trailer. El proyecto me parece interesante y quizás pueda ir a verla al cine:
https://www.filmaffinity.com/es/film191706.html
Críticas positivas y la pirámide de notas tiene una asimetría hacia la mitad-superior (de 7 a 10) y no tanto en la mitad-inferior (del 5 al 0). No sé si alguien de aquí conoce otros trabajos de la directora:
https://www.catarinavasconcelos.com/about
Dado que solamente me sale una película suya. Parece tener una filosofía muy "trascendental" full-of-meditation y no sé cómo se trasladará a su arte como producto final.
"[...] It took me six years to make this film. I started with something personal, with my family, and then I got quite concerned – I didn’t want it to be just some family story that no one else could connect to. At the same time, I don’t come from a cinema background, so I had nothing to lose. I was able to try things out. I come from fine arts, and suddenly, I started to have all these visions, taking me back to paintings, for example. You know when you are completing a jigsaw puzzle and all of these elements start to come together? That’s how it happened here, in a very weird way":
https://cineuropa.org/en/interview/387494/
"[...] I lived in London for almost four years. While I was there, I had this trivial conversation with my father over Skype. He was telling me about Lisbon and in the middle of it, he said, “by the way, your grandfather wants to burn the letters between him and your grandmother before he dies.” I was shocked. We had an argument because I wanted to read those letters. I didn’t meet my grandmother; she died two years before I was born. I truly believed that somehow I would meet her through the letters or, at least, know more about her. We had a discussion, and he said, although they are your grandparents, they are also people and you can’t just read their intimate letters. We finished this conversation, and I was very tempted to make a film about my grandmother.
When I came to Lisbon during Christmas, my father felt that I was sad about the letters. He told me there’s a vinyl that his mother made when he was very young. [He explained], “She took us to the post office, just to make a record.” The vinyl was made in 1957. It was dirty and not in good condition. I had to take it back to London to repair it. When I heard it for the first time, it was like a ghost speaking. Having Beatriz speak to me was how the film started and her voice appears at the end of the film.
My mother got sick when I was 11, and she died when I was 17. All of my time as a teen was with my mother dying. When someone dies, especially when you are younger, it becomes a part of who you are. By doing these films, I’m trying to rescue a part [of my life] that I didn’t live with my mother and with Beatriz. Funnily enough, when I started to make The Metamorphosis of Birds, I thought I was just trying to rescue my grandmother and her memory. It took me a long time to understand how this story was connected with my own story. It’s weird because everyone is like, of course, it’s the same story, but it took me a long time to see how they are connected. How losing the mother was something that connects me with my father. When someone as important as a mother dies, a part of you dies as well. Maybe it’s a way of rescuing or saving that part of myself.":
https://povmagazine.com/a-lesson-in-dying-an-interview-with-catarina-vasconcelos/
