Lunch with Ainda Ontem

An interview with Jessica Candal, director of Ainda Ontem

 Why were you interested in the transition from adolescence to adulthood and do you plan further projects dealing with this period of time?
I am interested in this period from adolescence to adulthood because it’s a time full of possibilities, but everything is yet to be determined. It’s an age when many paths seem possible, but it’s hard to take the first step towards one of them. The tension between dream and reality, desire and self-fulfillment, is what moved me to write and direct movies. Ainda Ontem (“Only Yesterday”) is the first of a series of three short films investigating this transitional time. I hope to end the dive in this theme with the release of the feature film Horizon, which I also wrote and is currently in the funding phase.

 Why did you want your characters to rap rhymes? Did you write them by yourself? How much do you like this style of music?
In fact, the original story was set in a small town in the 1990s. Originally, the characters’ dreams were set in the rock and grunge music universe. However, during casting, the actors and actresses brought their own experiences to their parts. Their personal dreams were linked to the hip hop universe, based on their real-life experiences in the suburbs of Curitiba. From this interaction with them, we incorporated the universe of rap and the city’s outskirts, but we kept the essence of the project, which was to deal with the tension between dreams and reality. So, all the rhymes in the film were created by the actors themselves. Some of them were improvised during filming and others were previously written.

 What is the “CIC” song? Why was it important for the film?
The song “CIC” was written by J.A.C. (Juri de Atitude Consciente/Jury of Conscious Attitude), one of the oldest rap groups in the CIC neighborhood and Curitiba. During production, Betinho Celanex (current member of the group, who plays Betão in the short film) mentioned that that year marked the 15th anniversary of the song and then the younger actors started telling us their own experiences and memories of the song: one of them said that he heard it for the first time during recess at school. Another one said that he saw a performance in his neighborhood. All of them not only knew the music, but also had a strong emotional attachment to it. After hearing these stories, I thought it would be important to incorporate the song into the film, as it carries a lot of meaning. So, in the film, the character Betão speaks about the song as a memory of a difficult time in the neighborhood, which he fears might become the reality again (due to the neoliberal and elitist ideals that took over national politics). For the character Neto and his young friends, the song is an inspiration on how to respond and transform the reality nowadays.

 Have you already planned a trip you never made?
Since the characters’ dreams take shape through rhymes in the short film, I will use the verses of the Brazilian poet Ana Martins Marques (in the poem “Amor Não Feito”) to answer that question. In the poem, she says how she remembers more of the love never loved, of the house where she didn’t live in, of the country she never visited, of the inaccessible beach seen from above. It’s the same for me. Stronger than the memories of what I have lived, are the memories of things I dreamed to do someday. However, that day never came. In the poem, she wonders what to do with the unsatisfied desire. Making movies is my attempt to an answer.

 Would you say that the short film format has given you any particular freedom?
The short and medium-length films I previously directed were more experimental and I had more freedom to test different methods and styles of shooting. In this project, because we ended up working in a bigger and more structured production mode, I had less room to experiment.

Ainda Ontem was selected in the International Competition (I1).