Interview: Catarina de Cèzanne - Director of "After Link" (Question 5)

ROFFEKE: I like your explanation of why you set the film in the 90s, maybe because I grew up in the 90s: "Because our generation is a haunted generation from the 90s. We grew up playing in the street, climbing trees, and suddenly came the Internet, MSN, Hi5. It was a very rapid progression, and we forever have this nostalgia for that world that will never come back. I miss the things that were palpable. It was essential that it be a retrofuturistic film because it's the style I want to grab, if possible, into all my films. It marks our generation, which we feel is a lost generation." Setting your film in the 90s, essentially makes it a period film. What challenges did you face (or what "aha!" moments did you have) in ensuring that the film was true to the 90s?

CATARINA: Being limited to a motorhome as a set location made everything easier, because we only had to set up the interior of that single location. Everything else was exteriors, so we all felt we could have total control and creative freedom to turn that small little space into our 90s/ early 2000s world.  

Everybody in our crew loved the retro aesthetic, so everybody brought something personal they found in their attic, in their room of old memories, to add to the background and that made all the difference. Rebecca Pilkington, Gastão Travado, Ilka Selmeczy and Randy L. Ericson dressed this wonderful world together, from the beautiful lights to the smallest details such as the personalized keys of the keyboard, GRIP and Camera department built the entire desk we see in the movie, I emptied my entire attic; the playstation 1, the cassettes, tarot cards, videogames, toys, posters… We took photographs of the cast to fill some of the walls with a Polaroid we bought in the flea market, and I even posted a request online asking people to donate tech-stuff that could be broken, or they no longer use. The old computer in the film was one of them, and because it was broken, we decided to hide a camera inside the actual computer and make it a third character in the film.

Ironically, although we never had any issues with our retro technology, such as the Polaroid and the tech that dressed up the film beautifully, we had, indeed, a few challenges with new technology that delayed the shoot for many hours. Modern technology is, in many ways, more convenient than the old, but it is also more unpredictable and sometimes unstable.

What I'm trying to say with this is that there’s this tech-addict fever of wanting to try everything new, especially in filmmaking, but we often tend to forget that it is not because something is “brand new” that you should use it in your film. Not everything built in the name of progress is better. 

 (Look out for Catarina's answer to question 6: "In Afterlink, there is that raw scene...'to demonstrate the connection between nature and technology'. Some of your team members expressed the very valid concern that this scene could risk the film not being shown. How did you navigate this difference in opinion/vision? Generally, how did you deal with conflicts or disagreements?")