Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Tiger entrant Neighbouring Sounds explores Brazilians’ fear of violence. By Edward Lawrenson
“Look at the windows in Holland,” says Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, in Rotterdam in advance of the IFFR world premiere of his debut feature
Neighbouring Sounds. “They’re huge. But windows in Brazil are tiny – you can’t see inside a house because people are protecting themselves.”
This telling observation comes as no surprise. An absorbing, superbly acted multi-character study of a middle-class area of Recife in Brazil, the movie reveals Filho’s sharp eye for the small details that point to what he calls “the paralyzing paranoia” of urban Brazilian culture. “Brazil is a fantastic place and you can be perfectly happy there,” he says, “but there is an underlying aspect of life which is really bad – the fear of violence.”
Filho’s film captures the everyday texture of his set of characters with engaging naturalism: not surprising really, given that Filho filmed the movie in and around the street where he lives, and based much of his screenplay on things he’s witnessed. But for all its focus on ‘ordinary’ domestic life, there is a quiet and creeping sense of unease to much of the film.
Filho exploits and plays with his audience’s pre-existing film knowledge to create and heighten this sense of tension. Citing an example, he refers to the moment when a car passes down a street at night, arousing the suspicion of a couple of sleepy security guards (on sentry duty on behalf of the residents). It’s an eerie and unsettling sequence precisely because it preys on preconceived genre notions. “Your film culture will probably tell you,” says Filho, “that the car contains gang members who will probably come out with machineguns and shoot (the security guards) down.” It would be wrong to reveal the car’s actual occupants, but we can say that the sequence is just one of Filho’s many attempts to wrong-foot the audience.
Sprawling and expansive, Filho’s plot is also elliptical and avoids tidy tying together of its narrative strands. How much did the structure change during editing? “I could play a little bit, but the film is frighteningly faithful to the script. I wrote the first draft very fast – in eight days. And over a period I kept adding details but it never lost any of the original scenes that I wrote. When I was writing a script I had this relationship to it as if I was reading a novel and I had to keep going home because I myself didn’t really know how things were going to turn out.”
Having just finished the film last week, Filho arrives in Rotterdam without a sales agent on board. “It was very tough post-production process,” he says, not least because of a complex sound design which brilliantly evokes the clamour of urban life in Brazil. Filho raised the rest of the budget of around €900,000 from state and government funds in Brazil, and is grateful to the Hubert Bals Fund for help on post production and script development. In fact, the HBF development fund was the first award he received: “The encouragement I got at Rotterdam was an early sign I had something,” he says.
More about Neighbouring Sounds here.