ROFFEKE: In your jornaldemonchique.pt interview, you mention that: “After the project was rejected by the ICA (Cinema and Audiovisual Institute) and numerous other institutions, I made an appeal online and we brought together a team of professionals from seven different countries in Europe to make the film with our own means”, What kept you going after all those rejections? What helped you not to give up?
CATARINA: In Portugal, being rejected by ICA and other government grants is a dead cert. I am almost certain that every filmmaker in Portugal has a project “on hold” waiting for rejection while doing some other film in the meantime, guerrilla style, or keeps working full-time or freelancing in publicity, or does something else. Even though we all pay taxes, nobody can expect anything from the government, and we are also extremely limited in any other grants.
It’s not a secret that our country suffers from elitism and nepotism in almost every industry. Once, I called in with questions regarding the submission application, and the secretary said “we are very busy today, calling the ones we know will submit to help them with the form”, which immediately told me that the process is not biased. While the application for government film grants is supposed to be free, I’ve also encountered government grants whose one of the leaders was selling her project consultancy services for that specific grant, with no guarantees of success and for a high fee, which tells us that art and culture are merely transactional. The process is also too long, sometimes leading to more than one year and a half years waiting to receive the notification of the results, while in other countries, such as Australia, government grants run every 4 months. Years ago, there was also a time when some of us, filmmakers, gathered to look into the previous film titles which did win said grant, usually between 20,000EUR and 60,000EUR, and we realised that those supposedly completed films were nonexistent on the web. This is all to say that we know the system is broken, we bet on local film funding (which comes out of our taxes) with less hope than choosing the numbers in the lottery.
Even though we did not receive monetary support, I feel extremely grateful for the council of Monchique for allowing us to film in the mountains without asking for a fee, for FatKat Productions equipment and the DoP, the motorhome as well as production supplies we borrowed from Southwest Productions, for Dona Ajuda who lend us second-hand clothes and objects for set dressing, Águas de Monchique who gave us bottles of water for free to survive the extreme heat of Summer, the Galician company Mesturasóns who did our sound mix, Mastervan who lend us walkie-talkies for the driving shots.
Seeing everyone so deeply engaged and dedicated to this project, despite us having no funding, was what made me not give up on this film. In the end, I guess we don’t
do it for us, we do it for them.
(Look out for question 3 in which I ask Catarina: The team includes British Rebecca Pilkington in the art department (“Eternals” and “The Danish Girl”), the propsmaster Hungarian Ilka Selmeczy (“Dune”) and Head of Locations Tony Frew (“The Poor Things”, “Gladiator”, “Mister Mayfair” and “That Good Night”), for sound, Sérgio Botelho (“Duros de Roer” and “Um Filme do Caraças”). Briefly, how did you manage to bring together such a diverse and experienced group of creatives?)
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