Gabriel Mascaro
August Winds, Gabriel Mascaro (2014)
Gabriel Mascaro is a Brazilian director, screenwriter, cinematographer, and visual artist. He directed several award-winning documentaries prior to August Winds, his narrative debut, which premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival, Rotterdam, FNC - Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, and Hong Kong. Portraying gender nonconformity in the traditionally masculine world of Brazil's vaquejada culture, Mascaro's second feature Neon Bull premiered at New Directors / New Films and Venice, where it won a Special Jury Prize.
In an exclusive interview with Filmatique, Gabriel Mascaro discusses wind, cinematic impossibility, the indeterminate status of reality and fiction, corporeal ambivalence, and his next projects.
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FILMATIQUE: Filmed in the northeastern Brazilian state of Alagoas, Ventos de Agosto (August Winds) loosely charts the trajectories of Shirley and Jeison, two workers on a local coconut plantation, whose quotidian activities of free-diving, sunbathing, and caring for their grandmother and father, respectively, are disrupted by the arrival of a climate researcher who is soon claimed by the rising sea. When did you first have the idea for this, your first narrative feature
GABRIEL MASCARO: A few years ago, during a journey along the coast of Pernambuco, northeast Brazil, I came across several abandoned mansions that had been destroyed by rising sea levels. We started to do some research into the phenomenon and how, in less than 30 years, beachside paradises had been turned to rubble and ruin by the sea. We discovered a cemetery that was being engulfed by the sea and struck me as a very powerful image. With this in mind a first treatment began to take shape.
I started to write about abandonment, memory, loss, possession, the waves, the sun, the salt, and the brick and mortar of the ruins. I felt, however, that my challenge was determining how to create images out of something that is invisible: the driving force of the wind. This apparent impossibility spurred my interest. I discovered the Dutch documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens who made his first work about the wind in 1965, Pour Le Mistral. In his last film, A Tale of The Wind, Ivens, with grey curly hair, asserts that in film the impossible is the best thing in life. This influenced me greatly and in August Winds I incorporated a character who I play in the film, a researcher who obsessively records the sounds and reverberations of the winds of the Intertropical Convergence Zone. The project ended up becoming a film about what remains, what is transitory, the languid passing of time and the cyclical nature of life. The symbolism of the wind as pervasive, propelling a narrative that is permeable and free.
FLMTQ: While unfolding primarily through these characters' perspectives, the film is threaded with evocations of ecological presence—the sound of winds battering the shore, the 'breathing' of coral reefs, waves seeping into a coastal graveyard. These sensuous, non-human elements draw a tenuous relationship between the film's human and natural worlds, attuning our awareness to their uneasy entanglement. What significance do you attribute to the coinciding, conflicting presences of ecological, animal, and human worlds on-screen, and how do you approach these assemblages cinematographically?
GM: In the film the August winds refer to the winds that exist around the Intertropical Convergence Zone, more commonly know as trade winds. They have a strong identity and are historically significant. They also have a distinct sound that is unforgettable. For me, these winds represent an inescapable and perpetual force of nature that imposes itself on the region. I chose to focus on the month of August as here in the Northeast of Brazil it is the month when the wind is strongest, joining forces with high tides to create the most damage of the year—turning this invisible force more palpable. As we filmed in the month of August, the filming was naturally marked by the presence of the wind. We shot with a small team, with no rigid schedule allowing us to shoot scenes that emerged spontaneously, organically, integrating the day-to-day reality of the village and its surroundings. To some degree the narrative was invisible to us—the climatic factors, the surroundings, the wind, were largely responsible for the encounters that we see on screen.
August Winds, Gabriel Mascaro (2014)
FLMTQ: Sound plays an important role in the film, gesturing toward imperceptible forces that shape our lives—or perhaps are simply indifferent to them. The unnamed climate researcher (your cameo appearance in the film) wanders the village clad in recording equipment, amplifications in the diegetic sound corresponding to where he points his microphone: wind, waves, the radio blasting through an open door, a group of giggling girls. Through technology, and his localized attention, it is suggested that this character—who could also be seen as our proxy onscreen—is able to focus on details that might otherwise go unnoticed. His presence thus becomes self-reflexive, a comment on the ability of cinema to shift our perception, the way we relate to our environments. Do you see filmmaking as more of a political or perceptual enterprise? Put differently, what responsibility, if any, do you believe the filmmaker has to the world he/she represents onscreen?
GM: I accumulated several roles in this film: director, writer, cinematographer, at times actor. I had a dynamic and very personal involvement in the filming. We were a tiny, intimate crew and everyone did a bit of everything. We were very concentrated, lodged in a house very close to set, and edited every day after shooting. For three weeks we didn't stop.
The most challenging part of this film was trying to find the right path to follow given the permeability of the narrative and the new possibilities that opened up everyday we filmed. Generally, I prefer not to talk about fiction and documentary as distinct. With the exception of Shirley, the lead character who wants to be a tattoo artist, none of the actors in the film are professionals and they are all from the small village where the film was shot. We went to the village and spread the word that we were looking for people to act in the film. Nearly all the inhabitants turned up for the tests, except Geová, who plays Jeison. Two days later he came looking for me, apologizing for having missed the tests and asking if there was a part in the film for a singer. I asked him to sing a song to the camera. As soon as he finished I invited him to be Jeison.
In the original script there was quite a bit of dialogue written for the non-actors and we worked with some improvisation exercises and studied the scenes carefully. With Dandara, who plays Shirley, it was a very different process. Initially, Shirley's character was very small and we were only going to film her for two days. She ended up filming twenty. She spent time living in the house where her on-screen grandmother (Maria) lived. It was then that we understood how this character would react in the environment and could be incorporated into the film to represent an external reality. Dandara spent a week helping Maria go to the toilet, preparing her food, putting her to bed, getting her blankets when she was cold, listening to her stories. Very soon Maria was calling Dandara her granddaughter without distinguishing between reality and fiction. When these boundaries are broken, what is real, flourishes, and what is not, becomes real.
FLMTQ: The tenuous co-existence of human and non-human realms is a topic addressed by both August Winds and your second narrative feature, Boi Neon (Neon Bull), which is replete with long, lingering shots observing animal life. This latter film has been read as queer insofar as it "advances an ecosystem that defies easy mapping." To what extent do you believe Neon Bull is a queer film, and what resonances do you see between August Winds and Neon Bull?
GM: Maybe because I try to create a debate of non-heteronormative sex scenes. I always try to portray bodily experience in a different layer, and always with ambivalence.
Neon Bull, Gabriel Mascaro (2015)