Portuguese director Miguel Gonçalves Mendes is appealing for financial support from Macau to complete his documentary film O Sentido da Vida (The Meaning of Life)
An ‘online’ campaign to raise funds to complete the documentary film O Sentido da Vida (The Meaning of Life), by director Miguel Gonçalves Mendes, was launched on December 24, 2018, with a target of 350,000 euros.
“It has been a struggle to finish the film, in fact the funding we are asking for is really just to complete the film in terms of post-production,” says the director of the film. “We still have a year of editing, and 2,000 hours of footage in seven different languages, which we have to translate and subtitle so that we can have the material to work with. It’s a thankless and difficult process.”
The goal is to turn the 2,000 hours of footage into two versions, one for movie theatres and another into eight episodes for television.
After six years of filming, the financial situation of the movie’s production “is so delicate,” says the director, who decided to setup a collective financing platform to try to complete the film.
“The truth is that, at the moment in Portugal, I can no longer find other forms of support other than ‘crowd funding’, which I hope will work,” says Gonçalves Mendes. The campaign ends on February 18, marking the one-year anniversary of the death of the protagonist of the documentary, Giovane Brisotto, a young Brazilian man with Familial Amyloid Polyneuropathy (FAP), known as Paramyloidosis. With an objective to raise 350,000 euros, that figure will allow for the completion of the editing and post-production of the film. The film is scheduled to debut in July 2020, a date the director intends to keep.
To the question of whether there were expenses exceeding those calculated in the budget, the director explains that the total estimated budget for the film was always “1.8 million euros”. Admitting that “as a budget for a Portuguese film, and especially for a documentary, [this figure] is a lot,” the director justifies the amount by explaining that, “it’s five years of filming eight people at all costs. This implies not only displacement, but also wages, so it was a very complicated process”.
The situation became more difficult when the protagonist of the film fell ill following complications after a liver transplant, ultimately leading to his passing about a year ago.
“This delayed the making of the film, and it was a very complicated phase,” he continues. The director also says that the production of the film was always “very precarious”, with Gonçalves Mendes himself assuming several functions from camera operator to producer, in an attempt to minimize costs.
Local support
So far the film has been funded by the documentary support line of the Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual (ICA) in Portugal, which awarded the maximum value of 80,000 euros. The film also received financial support from the production company of Fernando Meirelles, director of movies such as City of God, The Constant Gardener and Blindness, and by the Municipal Councils of Lisbon and Porto.
Gonçalves Mendes also highlights the support received in Macau from architect Carlos Marreiros. So far, in the territory, “the only support we have managed to get was from Carlos Marreiros, nobody else, and Macau, throughout my filmography, has played a very important role.” he says. The director did not disclose the amount of support provided by Marreiros, but stressed: “It was not much, but it was nice, at least he helped, in that sense I have to be very grateful to Carlos Marreiros, because he has supported all the projects I have done. The film Nada Tenho de Meu only exists thanks to Carlos Marreiros”.
The importance of Macau
Miguel Gonçalves Mendes has been filming Macau since at least 1999, when the territory was handed over to the People’s Republic of China. In 2012 he returned to screen the film José e Pilar – dedicated to the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature, Portuguese writer José Saramago – which was screened at the first edition of the The Script Road – Macau Literary Festival, launched that same year.
At that time, Gonçalves Mendes filmed Nada Tenho de Meu in Macau, a series of 11 episodes in the form of a documentary, with the participation of Brazilian writers João Paulo Cuenca and Tatiana Salem Levy, who were invited to the first edition of The Script Road.
The director returned to the territory the following year to film writer Valter Hugo Mãe, also a guest of the Macau Literary Festival, and one of eight public figures who also participated in the film O Sentido da Vida. At the same time, while in Macau, the director gathered material, including from Macanese lawyer and playwright Miguel de Senna Fernandes, to be included in his film Sotaques, which was based on the reading of the children’s book by Valter Hugo Mãe, O paraíso são os outros.
To justify his appeal for financial contributions from the territory, the director emphasizes the “importance of spending a month filming [the documentary] in Macau.”
“There was almost a kind of redemption of this memory of places where Giovane recognized himself, although he was not Portuguese, but that is also the humour of this story. It was as if this was the perfect excuse to speak of the processes of globalization because, ultimately, he was not Portuguese, he was of Portuguese origin, and came to Macau and later in Japan, he ended up finding people who also had the same problem as him”.
The incurable disease Paramyloidosis is actually of Portuguese origin, and was spread throughout the world during the period of the country’s transcontinental navigation. In the film, Giovane takes a trip around the world, covering more than 56,000 kilometers, disembarking in India and, establishing the route that is thought to have been the first trip to spread the disease, going to Macau and then to Japan, on a journey where he aspires to understand ‘The Meaning of Life’.
Along the way, Giovane “meets people with the disease, in Portugal, Brazil and India, but the largest number were in Japan, near Nagasaki where the Portuguese were settled for 100 years,” Gonçalves Mendes says.
The logic of filming in Macau was to register “recognizable spaces for Giovane; he himself said that being in Senado Square reminded him of Rio de Janeiro. It was this sense of familiarity, and at the same time, there was a city in full construction, as if there were a wall of casinos that separated an old Macau from a new Macau, which was in the process of mutation,” explains the director.
In parallel, the film follows seven stories of eight public figures. Guiding the viewer on this odyssey are Portuguese writer Valter Hugo Mãe; the first Danish astronaut to travel to space, Andreas Mogensen; human rights defender Baltazar Garzón, who is a lawyer for Julian Assange; contemporary Japanese artist Mariko Mori; the Icelandic composer Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, mentor to Björk and Sigur Rós; porn film actor Colby Keller; and former presidential candidates from Brazil, Marina Silva and Dilma Russef.
Involving the benefactors
The proposal by JumpCut, the production company behind the film, in creating the collective financing platform, in collaboration with the Ciência Viva Program, is “to involve everyone in the process of creating a documentary work, while simultaneously financing the demanding post-production of this film,” the director notes.
There are various forms of support on the financing platform. Depending on how much people donate, contributions can be converted into invitations to the movie premiere, participation in private sessions during the final edit, watching the recording of music in the studio, or even attending intimate dinners at the director’s house with characters from the film, including with writer Valter Hugo Mãe, astronaut Andreas Mogensen, fado singer Camané or musician Noiserv, as special guests. There is also the option of having your face in a frame of the film for 10 euros – all you have to do is submit a photo. And there are also special options for students, with access to a director-oriented workshop focusing on the genre of biographical documentaries.
www.themeaningoflifethemovie.com