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Letters from the end of the world

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In Cartas da Guerra (War Letters) Macau-based director Ivo M. Ferreira addresses the Portuguese colonial war in Angola, imagined and experienced through love letters sent by writer António Lobo Antunes to his wife, between 1971 and 1973
 
 
Director Ivo M. Ferreira has recently returned to Macau, after a year of intense work divided between Portugal and Angola. The time was dedicated to filming the adaptation of the book D’este viver aqui neste papel descripto, which brings together letters written by the then 28-year-old lieutenant, doctor and future writer, António Lobo Antunes, to his wife Maria José, from the backdrop of the colonial war in Angola between 1971 and 1973. Ivo’s wife, actress Margarida Vila-Nova, plays the part Maria José. 
 
The project is based on an original idea the director had back in 2009.  Currently the film already at the editing stage, according to Ferreira.
 
The film, produced by the company O Som e a Fúria, was one of 15 projects selected to participate in the Venice Film Market, part of the 72nd edition of the International Venice Film Festival.
 
 – Shooting in the land at the end of the world  –
 
From the first moment Ferreira encountered the letters until the end of the shoot, the project was characterized by different demanding phases. 
 
“It was very hard work,” says the director. “It was a heavy and expensive project.  We interrupted our lives in Macau to come here to Lisbon for a year and make the film, and Margarida was also working on a soap opera for Portuguese television.” 
 
Filming began in January, first in Angola. 
 
“We shot for four weeks in Cuando-Cubango an inhospitable area known as the ‘land at the end-of-world’ and in Malange, where there is only one final scene of the film. It was very, very hard,” the director recounts. 
 
 
Some crew members fell ill and the actors had to “spend days walking in water and in rivers with crocodiles. It was a little unnerving,” recalls Ferreira.
 
The cast included Portuguese and Angolan actors. On screen, actor Miguel Nunes, 28, plays the role of the young Lobo Antunes. 
 
“It’s a very young casting. These kids were very young when they went on their commission. We are talking about people aged between 18 and 20-something,” explains Ivo.
 
The case of Lobo Antunes was an exception as he was already 28.  He had finished his degree in medicine in 1969 and was married in August 1970, just before leaving for the war on January 6, 1971. 
 
The main set, the Chiúme barracks, was built from scratch. To do this it was necessary to rebuild a bridge that was destroyed with dynamite during the war, so that the trucks with building materials for the film set barracks could get through. 
 
“This has nothing to do with Hollywood-like processes, but it is still absolutely amazing. There was no water or electricity. There was a village, and a stream that passed through, but we needed infrastructure. Little miracles took place there. Little miracles and lots of work,” Ferreira continues, praising the “vital and crucial” support of the local people and the provincial government of Cuando-Cubango.
 
  – Political growth of the man and writer  –
 
The film follows a narrative created by Ferreira. The director, who wrote the screenplay together with Edgar Medina, always thought there were “powerful lines that could allow for the making of a script with the letters.”
In particular, he was interested in working on the “political side” of the letters of António Lobo Antunes: the colonial war. 
 
In Lobo Antunes’ letters “there is a political growth, there is a change. Dr Antonio leaves Lisbon, a magnanimous intellectual, having absolutely remarkable, enviable luggage in terms of his literature collection,” says the director. And then “intersects with characters like Ernesto Melo Antunes and Captain Ninda in the film.”
 
“There is intellectual character growth throughout the process. There is an initial phase of wonderment with Africa, with the landscape, the animals, the culture of the people, an almost ethnographic enchantment.” 
 
“Then there is a second phase where a number of issues arise. Lobo Antunes even says ‘I cannot go on living as before.’” 
 
“There is a taking of a political position on the war, the injustice, the stupidity on both sides, the absurd injustice of throwing these kids into a situation they did not even know why they went to in the first place,” Ferreira explains.
In a third phase, “the enemy is no longer the Portuguese State, is no longer [António Oliveira] Salazar, the enemy is within themselves. They are their own enemies, in the sense that they no longer believe that they will return, as well as not knowing how to get back.” 
 
“If we go to the military archives, many suicides are not reported as such, but what is true is that suicides went up before the soldiers returned home or in the second year of their commissions [when they were placed in areas least affected by the war]. 
 
“All the elements I have indicate that it was not during times of adversity that people gave up living and fighting, but when they believed they would not return. António Lobo Antunes thought he would not return. Perhaps that’s the reason he didn’t save all the letters to Maria José, that he burned some of them,” says Ferreira.
 
– A book of love –
 
The film takes as its starting point issues that are “super-sensitive”, explains Ferreira. “It is a work of a writer before becoming a writer, they are love letters, very intimate documents revealing the intimacy of a couple.” 
 
They are also letters written by one of the most widely read, translated and awarded Portuguese writers alive today. But at the time the letters were written, Ferreira remembers, “he was a young man who was still writing his first book. Only in 1978 was his first work published, very influenced by the colonial war, as indeed was much of his work.” 
 
The director spoke with Lobo Antunes’ daughters Maria José and Joana, who initially expressed concern that because of the intimate nature of the letters, it would be very difficult to allow them to be adapted into a movie, no matter how genuine the intention of the filmmaker.
 
But from the outset there was a “predisposition” to consent, and Ferreira had already established contact with António Lobo Antunes. 
 
“Although I did not know him well, apart from having worked with him, we have created a very special relationship and to me, he is a very special person.” 
 
After this film, Ferreira already has another project in the pipeline. 
 
“We will now go back to Macau and start shooting Hotel Império, from February next year, which is a film supported by the Macau Cultural Affairs Bureau, the production company O Som e a Fúria and Portuguese television.”
 
Margarida Vila-Nova, wife and muse of Ferreira, will also be the female protagonist of Hotel Império.
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