Who is the youngest director with a Golden Bear? – publico

                 

                         
                     

                         
                     

                         

                 

 
 

The phone rings three times and Leonor meets. You are in Berlin, where on Saturday night won the Golden Bear for Best Short Film, and one realizes, it is still the remake is the wave that engulfed her since. Has a plane to catch there in twenty minutes, but, yes, you still have time to talk a little.

“It’s all happening too fast,” he says. “Yesterday was a nobody and now I’m sprawled in the newspapers.” He is 23 years old, is the youngest director ever to receive a Golden Bear and the people who attended the 66th Berlin Film Festival were naturally curious about this girl, gypsy by his father, who made a movie about frogs crockery and xenophobia that exists in Portugal against Roma.

“What I felt during the festival was that people really liked the film a lot,” he says. “They saw me on the street and came to talk to me, I felt I was being very well received. But the best was to see people laugh with the movie, to have fun. It’s good to feel it “

In Portugal had also been given for it. – Well, not the general public, but those who were attentive and who discovered it in 2013 when Leonor presented his first short, Rhoma Acans , in Vila do Conde festival, where he won the prize Take One!.

Since there had wanted to talk about gypsies. “It was an idea I had for a long time.” But it was when he majored in Lisbon Theatre and Film School in Amadora (however has done his Masters in Audiovisual and Multimedia in Higher School of Social Communication), he realized “that these concerns could find comfort in the form of film.” And that concerns were? “How my life would be if my father had not married my mother, a person from outside the community? Concerns that had to do with the fact that girl, could study. “

It was the second year of the degree when he was searching for answers together of Roma girls in Casal dos Watertight, Symington, and in particular a , Joaquina, 15, who has lived a marriage that had not worked. Despite not having grown up in the middle of the Roma community, Leonor kept contact. “My father, now deceased, was gypsy and I was always on because my whole family on his side is Gypsy, my grandmother is Roma and I did not grow up away from it.”

The language Rhoma Acans was the documentary, interviews with the girls. Ballad of a Batrachian has a completely different film language. “It’s not something that I have thought a lot or control. It happened. I follow my instinct. ” What did you do in the short, eleven minutes, who won in Berlin, was to take action.

The film talks about the habit that exists in Portugal to put dishes of frogs on the doors of shops to keep Gypsies away. And it starts with a gypsy traditional story about the time “before people exist and rule the world.”

At that time, “all living things could move freely.” But one day there was a big party, where everyone was happy, until there came a sapo and everyone started making fun of him and tell him how it was horrendous. Animal swelled to explode and since that day the animals lose their speech, the flowers stopped moving and the fish could now only live in the water.

Ballad of a Batrachian part, on the other hand, a “frustration” that Leonor feels “regarding the fact that the movies only address the issues and doing nothing about them.” This time she wanted to act. “The film is based on the idea, perhaps naive, that the action may lead to a change of attitude,” says the presentation text. “I wanted to make an energetic, ironic and irreverent film.”

And that meant going with your team, to the street, go into the shops and from the dish of frogs by shooting them with the full force for the ground. “I just wanted to illustrate the fact wanted them to do something about it. To say that this may be an answer. ” Note that writes about the film states that wanted to “surprise the audience with what they know and what they think they know.” He concludes that “the frogs are always very difficult to swallow.”

Because, in Portugal, “there is xenophobia, of course I do.” “The Roma are the last in the food chain. And will continue to be so, will not change. That is the truth. ” But their criticisms go both ways: the Roma and the rest of society. “There is still a lot of discrimination. There is no effort on both sides. Or rather, there is but it is residual. ” And it takes a lot of effort, he says.

“The gypsies are within them and enjoy being. But you have to start changing. We can not continue to use the excuse is cultural and that justifies everything. ” For Leonor “There are things that have no justification, and on both sides.” Things like the frogs in the windows “on the side of society,” and the side of Gypsy marriages of underage girls who are prevented from studying. “And then, in the courts, judges can not continue to say that it is a matter of culture.”

And she, Leonor, suddenly catapulted to the front pages of newspapers for a film that itself He describes as “silly and crude,” want to have a role in a possible rapprochement between the Roma to the rest of society? “I do not!” Answers, fast. “I made the film, which has to do is people to go see it and take it what they please. Not for me to take the role of judge. “

It’s back to Portugal and will continue to work. “I do not work only as a director, I can not. I have done things for television, small advertisements, and film work on other people’s projects. ” But already has a new personal project head, a film done in the land, Vila Franca de Xira. “Part of a place and of a character and the Tagus River region.” This time nothing to do with Roma. “This topic is now closed for.”