Can you tell us more about the choice of title?
Last four years in deep Brazil we were bombarded by robots of far-right movements, financed by the same economic agents that destroy nature and kill people with social vulnerability. By triggering fake news, they create a collective delirium and social vigilance to try to suffocate any expression of resistance. Ainda Restarão Robôs Nas Ruas Do Interior Profundo (There Will Still Be Robots on the Streets of the Deep Interior, in free translation) is a metaphorical expression, almost a prophecy, to say that the spirit of fascism will still be on the streets of Brazilian countryside, even with the recent return of democracy, and the film tries to express that the Brazilian youth working class is united and aware.

How familiar are you with that marginal world?
I’m from Assis, the small town where the film was produced but spent eight years in São Paulo’s capital where I was a music reporter that covered the Brazilian hip-hop scene. My connection with the marginal world came from this. In 2014 I came back to Assis for developing films and find themes that could reflect my real origins. There I found the invisible world of the countryside cities margins, poor places where farm workers like my ancestors have been pushed after the mechanization of their jobs. The peripheral Santa Clara neighborhood where we filmed and where the screenwriter Daniel Rone lives is one of those places. Although I come from a middle-class background, I’m experiencing the contradictions of the territory where I live, and I feel connected to this marginal world through a filmmaking process that reflects on what should be more latent in our sensibility as a society.

How have recent political events impacted people living on the margins like these in your experience?
The last four years are very hard for us Brazilians, especially for the marginal people. Our policy even was racist, but in the last four years, they had a president who authorized racial violence. We even were a very unequal society, but last year we saw the hungry come back on the streets, we saw a very aggressive deregulation of the work that made the youth accept precarious jobs, without any social guarantee, or just surrender to the crime opportunities. Today, on the margins of little countryside towns, the guys who came from the field, work for Ifood or crime, and their moms and fathers are working by cleaning the rich people’s houses, building them new mansions or taking care of their security. But those marginal people won the last election, not the middle class, so I think we are rising our class conscience, and that is just the beginning.

What did you want to explore by telling us their story?
The place where I live, like a large part of the Brazilian countryside, had never had a film production before. So firstly, I and my team wanted to create a window so the people of this place could see themselves on screen and reflects on its reality. After that, we wanted to show the world the invisible part of our country, and say that we have a lot of cinematographic stories that had never been filmed before. We just need opportunities.

How did you find shooting with a horse?
The film screenplay was developed based on real stories of the Santa Clara neighborhood. A young boy called Luquinha, who comes from the field to live in the city margins, bought a horse on OLX (e-commerce platform), but it’s always on the run. The horse’s name is Morena, and Luquinha had take care of it during the film production. Even in the downtown scene, Morena was very calm.

What sorts of stories and themes do you like to work with as a filmmaker?
Nine years ago I left the big city to make films in the countryside. Since then, I’ve been looking for narratives of this invisible world and its peripheries.

What’s your favourite short?
Sideral by Carlos Segundo.

What does the Festival mean to you?
More than me, it’s an important recognition for all the friends who are walking together against the wind and making films in the interior of São Paulo. This film is the result of a very collective process. We are organized into an audiovisual cooperative that brings together 27 filmmakers and producers, the Oeste Cooperativa Audiovisual, project manager. It’s our first fiction film, and being in the international competition of the biggest short film festival in the world is a sign that we are on the right track. We’re delighted.

Ainda Restarão Robôs Nas Ruas Do Interior Profundo is being shown as part of the International Competition I1.

Where did the idea for this film come from?         
This story is a cumulative memory of my experiences in attending funeral wakes. I realised funeral wake nowadays have little to do with the deceased. In Singapore, we often see family members and funeral wake guests chatting leisurely, discussing business, drinking alcohol, and even gambling rather than remembering the one who passed on. Some people even spend a vast sum of money on a lavish funeral wake, but I can’t help but wonder if it is truly for the deceased or because of saving one’s face for the living.

Can you tell us a bit more about the issues surrounding cremation? What’s the cultural context? 
Singapore is always facing land scarcity, and this issue has led to cremations and columbaria replacing burial grounds to house the dead. Cremating a wrong body is a rare case, but it has happened before in different parts of the world. In a traditional Singapore Chinese funeral, the deceased family members will usually hold a funeral wake that last a few days for family and friends to pay their final respect to the deceased. It is often very rowdy, it feels like you are attending a carnival and cremation is just the last act of the carnival. People can be very judgemental when they are at a funeral. If you didn’t express your sadness or emotion strongly, others may criticise you for being heartless and insensitive. Therefore, most people behave in a certain way just to fit into the expectation and judgment of other people and the society.

What would you hope the audience takes away from the film? 
This is a dark comedy film as it presents the absurdity of funeral practice and hypocrisy of humans in a light-hearted way. I hope the audience will laugh when they watch the film, but also ponder after watching when they pick out what resonates with them, and how realistic the narrative is grounded in. I also hope the audience will learn to decide or take action based on what their heart feels is right and not based on what the society or others perceive. There are many things in this world that matter more than money and social status. Live for yourself and your family as our time in this world is short.

What’s your background as a filmmaker?    
I made my first film when I was studying Digital Media in Singapore Polytechnic. After completing my 2 years of mandatory military service, I decided to take further my studies in Beijing Film Academy, Department of Directing. After 4 years in China, I’m currently back in Singapore. I often joke that I’m probably quite useless if I can’t make films because I don’t have any other skill sets!

What are your cinematic inspirations? 
Yasujiro Ozu, Ang Lee, Alejandro González Iñárritu. Their sensibilities and their ability to evoke emotions and feelings in their films that linger in my heart for a long, long time.

What’s your favourite short? 
Oscar winning short film Skin (2018) by Guy Nattiv. The ending blew me away.

What does the Festival mean to you? 
A dream came true! It has always been a mini dream of mine to have my film selected and screen in Clermont-Ferrand. I’m forever grateful and I can’t wait to be there!

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is being shown as part of the International Competition I1.

What has inspired you to shoot Holodno?
On YouTube, I found a video where a former police officer was telling the story of how he and his partner, in his youth, were carrying the corpse of a fisherman on New Year’s Eve. The buses didn’t run and they had to pick up some passengers from the bus stop. It happened in my homeland, in the north of Russia. This event is not uncommon for this region. I thought it was fun.

Can you tell us a bit about the filming process, from the writing of the script to the shooting?
I wrote the script in a week. Then, by chance, I met the producer Nikita Vladimirov, who liked this story. I wanted to make a film in three days of shooting, but there was no budget for that, and winter was coming to an end. I had to film all in one shift. It was very cold, and that helped us. The shoot was on 8th of March. All the snow melted the next day.

What is the most challenging part for you when making the film? Was it tricky to make a film in such extreme weather conditions? (If there were as extreme as shown on screen).
Yes, it was very cold that day, and everyone on the set often said “Holodno” (It’s cold). The hardest part for me was preparation. I was so scared. I was afraid not to cope, because I had no experience. But as soon as they gave me a playback and a walkie-talkie, all fear were gone somewhere. I just had to shoot. And it was fun. But the fun ended when the editing time came…

Is there a particular short film that has made a strong impression on you?
I really like the film The Procedure directed by Calvin Reeder.

What’s your definition of a good film?   
For the short film: it should be laconic. For the full-length film: it shouldn’t be boring. But characters are the most important. They have to be alive.

Holodno [It’s Cold] is being shown as part of International Competition I1.

How did you meet the Mamba Negra collective? 
I have been in one of their parties in Rio de Janeiro. It was amazing. It is a party with many performances from different artists. 

Why did you choose to make a documentary about this underground scene in Brazil?
My producer met them in Amsterdam, where they also made one of their parties and came up with the idea to make a film about the underground scene in São Paulo. So, I have chosen Mamba Negra, Teto Preto, Novíssimo Edgar and Malka Julieta.

Would you say that Jair Bolsonaro’s repressive presidency has made the underground community more determined than ever to use art as resistance?
For sure. They are aware of it. During the campaign for presidency the people who voted for Bolsonaro started to be violent and threatening. When Bolsonaro won they just started to attack the people they did not like, it was like they got a green light to do whatever they wanted. Then the artists started to fight back, art became a way to resist.

How do you hope audiences will react to the film?
I hope the public will feel what the artists want to express. I wanted to reach the senses of the public, more than to tell a story.

Is there a particular short film that has made a strong impression on you? 
Yes, Svyato from Viktor Kossakovsky. It is a very philosophical film and brilliantly done.

What’s your definition of a good film? 
A good film is the one that thrills. Stir the emotions of the public. 

São Paulo Open Wound is shown as part of International Competition I1.

Can you tell us a bit about your inspiration and the story behind the story of Sestry?
I thought for a long time what my graduation movie would be about. I had too many emotions I struggled to express. Problems at home, a loved one struggling with addiction and myself struggling with my self-worth. Many ideas had been thrown on paper just to be scratched. Somewhere along the way I saw a picture of a sculpture of a huge head, which make me think of the rest of its body – if it existed – would be buried underground. An idea of slowly being pulled under by things that weighted one down came to my mind, and it was suddenly a point I could focus on. And with the one drowning came the other person trying to save him. I felt I found a representation so simple, so universal, anyone could find their own story in it.

From a technical point of view, this film differs from your previous animation film, Afternoon Tea. What has drawn you to use a different technique?
While Sestry was my graduation movie, Afternoon Tea was a previous school project I worked on in my second year of FAMU. The school encourages us to try various techniques, and while I had fun delving into stop motion and animating with puppets in Afternoon Tea, I ultimately returned to digital animation and to drawing by hand – were I feel most at home.

Can you tell us a bit about the tools and methods you used for Sestry?
The final technique of Sestry was 2D digital hand drawn animation with elements of digital paper cut technique. However, the media that inspired me were my initial sketches done with color markers. The texture created by coloring with markers on paper led me to search for ways to transfer this aesthetic into the digital space. I experimented with various digital brushes with altered opacity, sketching as one would with markers. This resulted in the hand sketched animated textures you can see in the movie.

Is there a particular short film that has made a strong impression on you? 
A short film that caught my attention last year was Coffin made by Gobelins students. The movie shows a glimpse into the life in China’s Coffin Homes – were many people are forced to live together in small flats. I had the pleasure of seeing the movie in Annecy and I was captured by the way the film expressed the frustration of living in an enclosed space, of having no escape from others invading your privacy. I loved how the surrounding distractions took a tangible form in a way animation does it so well.

What’s your definition of a good film? 
There are many types of good films. Ones that make you laugh, ones that make you shed a tear, ones that make you think or ones that surprise you by bringing something new to the table. Attending festivals, you often sit through hours and hours of short films, but after you leave, you will only remember a few. A good film, ultimately, is one that stays with you.

Sestry [Sisters] is being shown as part of International Competition I1.