On the third day of the festival, our programmer Jurica Pavičić talked to director Karim Aïnouz, in a Q&A also open to questions from the audience, at the CineChill zone. Aïnouz lives and works in Berlin, but his films are often set in a Brazilian context.
This year, Cinehill is screening two films by the famous Brazilian director, Motel Destino, an erotic drama competing for the main festival award, the Cinehill Propeller, and The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão, in the program Stories from Brazil. All eyes are on Brazil at Cinehill, since it’s the festival’s partner this year.
“I wanted to make something colourful. I don’t even know what that means, but I had a visceral need to make something really bright, colourful and energetic” – said the director of Motel Destino. The film was set to shoot in 2017, but given the political situation in Brazil and the pandemic, the project was postponed. “In the end, everything turned out great, since filming started just when humanity was coming back to life. The film recorded, or hoped to record, that moment, that energy and the feeling that life could end tomorrow and should be lived.”
“Hey, mind your own business”, joked Aïnouz, referring, as he says, mostly to the French and Americans, yet never the Brazilians, who have at times reproached him for exoticizing Brazilian culture in his works. The selector of the festival’s main program, Jurica Pavičić, broached this interesting topic of exoticisation, that often occurs with films from the Balkans when they are considered for film festivals.
“I never even dreamed that I would become a director”, said Karim Aïnouz, looking back on his biography. “Where I come from, you’re allowed to hope for three careers when you grow up, and be either an engineer, lawyer, or doctor.” In his case, he pulled off a trick, by graduating in architecture and becoming “almost an engineer”. He later received a scholarship for a Master’s in film history at NYU. “My first contact with filmmaking was filming my grandmother in her eighties, in a desire to create some memories before she passed away. However, the grandmother lived to be 108 years old.” The film, although originally consisting only of his grandmother’s memories of her younger days, ended up being distributed in the US.
This newfound talent and love for film would later develop into a fruitful career. But a lot of hard work went into it as well, remarks Pavičić calling him a workaholic, since he’s currently working on three different films. What also makes this author exceptional is his genre and thematic breadth. He is currently working on a Japanese story recorded on 8 mm tape and an adaptation of the stories by the Brothers Grimm. His erotic thriller Motel Destino was released this year, Firebrand about the 15th century-English monarchy came out last year, and he’s also done a documentary about Syrian refugees and many other frequently socially engaged topics.
“I’m also inspired by what we very condescendingly call B movies. There are no A and B movies, there are only… movies”, explains Karim Aïnouz, referring to the forgotten Brazilian porno-comedies made in the 90s. “These are comic erotic films that actually address something truly sublime. And they are always colourful. I often find inspiration in them.”
One of the questions from the audience touched on the sexual scenes that abound in both of Aïnouz’ films shown at the festival. “These sex scenes are not there for the sake of the audience, but for the sake of the characters”, he explains, saying that these scenes are able to give a better insight into the inner world of the protagonists. “I think that intimate scenes have the power, for example, to portray the dread that people, especially women, experienced when they found themselves in the bedroom with a stranger who was to be their husband, in the case of an arranged marriage.”
The director emphasised that he cooperates with intimacy coordinators for the scenes, which he considers vital. “In the beginning I thought it wasn’t necessary, because I know I would never do anything that would make someone uncomfortable. But then I realised that the coordinator was not there for my sake, but to make the actresses and actors feel comfortable with a certain scene,” Aïnouz finished his reflections on cinematic art, society and contemporary reality.
