Teolinda Gersao is a writer from my mother’s generation, one about whom she used to speak with great admiration, both of her work and of her humanism. Her most recent book, Passages (Passagens), begins at the funeral of Ana, who is the mother of some of the characters. Despite being dead, Ana speaks: the book is composed of inner voices. I still have this kind of inner dialogue with some people and this might be the reason why the book touched me in a sensitive spot.
The narrative presented in the book gives me the opportunity, through its characters, to develop complex feelings such as redemption and regret, crystallized love or latent revolt. The difficult handling of emotional and familiar ties in this screenplay, comes across as a point of reflection on contemporary life, where reality is a time continuum that neither erases the past nor eases the future. This cinema adaptation project focuses on a specific part of the novel Passages, where the narrative is more concrete and the characters are more palpable and therefore also more vulnerable. In the conversation I had with the writer, I found out that this story was based on real events and on her relatives. This relationship with real facts reinforced my interest in adapting this part of the book. Moreover, it inspired me to bring to the film contemporary elements of Portuguese reality. While writing the script, I sought to create ruptures that would allow for improvised dialogues between non-actors about historical facts, recent events and personal experiences.
The script was written ignoring genre conventions, rather by exploring the codes of realist cinema and documentary, but also those of comedy, melodrama, biopic, police and horror films. With this dispersion of genres, I intended to “free” the viewer from the emotional orientation which I think each cinematographic genre imposes. The film proposes various interpretations and narrative paths, seeking to develop a non-linear structure, like a hypermap in the era of interactive navigation. Nevertheless, shipwreck seems always inevitable.