Start without fear: João Mendes Pinto

One of the students who has already completed this discovery is João Mendes Pinto who, in the most recent edition of the Sophia Awards in 2023, won the Student Prize with the short documentary film Enquanto Houver Ovelhas, which follows a couple of shepherds in Seia. However, he confesses that documentaries are not the only format he intends to explore in his chosen role in cinema: directing.

A recent graduate in cinema, he is now studying for a master's degree in the area and is taking advantage of the network that exists in his student work: colleagues in the different areas of production. Regarding his plans for the future, he cites a reference of his, the Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki: "I've never made a great film, but I've made several middling ones."

And what are these films? João doesn't (yet?) say he's tied to a medium or a genre. He talks about ideas that grab him and push him towards a new project, but that "being a director isn't a carte blanche to take credit for everything". So that original idea "is something that is built with the team. The way it's lit, the actors' interpretation of the dialogue, these are all things that build the film."

João says he's aware of the difficulty of making films in Portugal, but argues that this didn't even enter into the decision-making process. "I had no choice but to follow this passion." He even refuses to consider migrating to another country where making films might be easier, because, he says, "I want to film what I know, and what I experience on a daily basis. If I landed in another country to film now, I'd have an exoticised vision. Like when someone comes here, films the D. Luís bridge and thinks they've invented the wheel."

Portugal/Germany, 2024

Mariana Bártolo feels that same attachment to the stories she knows, especially now with what she calls "emigrant syndrome", since she is living in Germany. She originally studied at the Escola Superior de Dança in Lisbon, where "everyone already knew that I carried a camera around with me, people got used to this sort of extension of my body". Her choice for dance lost staying power and she began applying for film courses around Europe. "I wanted something that was media art and not just typical film studies" — and that's what she found at the KHM —Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany.

Although she entered the course with photography in mind, cinema gradually took over and is now her main focus, and the early days have left their mark. "Dance still informs the work I do and the work I do with actors. The physicality, the emotions that the body arouses."

In 2023, she was part of an exhibition of three Portuguese short films at the Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival, with the documentary As Gaivotas Cortam o Céu, which she co-authored with García Lopez. But Mariana admits that she is "detached from awards". "I know how important it is on the CV, but I'm not dazzled by these things. On the contrary, I'm more of a dissident, more underground." Still, there was time for the essentials. "I remember one moment that was very important, which was going to the cinema and seeing Salaviza's new film and realising 'ah, that's what I'm here for'. I was very moved by the film, and it also served to bring me back to reality, in the midst of that world of show-off."

Reality turns out to be the director's main object, and she already has three documentary short films and two fiction films based on her own affective memories. This exposure is seen as inevitable by Mariana. "We can't get away from ourselves, although I like to go a little beyond myself with fiction."

Cinema back in the centre

À Mesa, by Mariana Bártolo, was one of the works chosen for the Pascaud grant, one of the two categories of Filmaporto's annual funding grants. Created by the Porto City Council in 2021, Filmaporto is a film commission — a type of organisation dedicated to promoting and supporting film production in specific cities or territories. This support includes the promotion of available professionals in Porto, operational assistance for foreign productions travelling to Porto for filming, and the awarding of grants for productions shot entirely in the city. These grants — the Neves Scholarship and the Pascaud Scholarship (named after the pioneers of cinema exhibition in Porto, António Neves and Édmond Pascaud) — have already awarded 15 scholarships worth 20,000 euros each.

Although it is an instrument for the industry, Filmaporto has a point of contact with the public: since the inauguration of the Batalha Cinema Centre, every last Thursday of the month Filmaporto Sessions have been screened, featuring films by new Porto directors, filmed in Porto, that have not yet been shown in the city.

The responsibility of cinema

Tomás Paula Marques was the guest who inaugurated Batalha's New Moons in December 2022. The session included the director's first three short films and ended with When We Dead Awaken, a film-performance in analogue projection with the participation of regular collaborator João Abreu. Paula recently premiered her new short film, Dildotectónica, and is already preparing her next work. In conversation, she admits that cinema was a late calling. Although it was always there, during her teenage years "I was interested in literature, photography, theatre too, acting", and cinema ended up gaining supremacy as "an intersection between all the other artistic expressions".

But that's not all. She also saw that cinema "allowed for a project of empathy and the creation of debate, through the modelling of emotions and time", which the other arts didn't leverage in the same way. This modelling of emotions is only possible through working closely with performers, a skill developed early on at Lisbon's Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema. The degree was followed by a postgraduate course in Sociology, but Marques doesn't recognise this as a deviation. "Basically, I also see cinema as a possible social science and, in that sense, going into Sociology came from a shortcoming I felt in my degree in Cinema: a negligence in relating the representation of the Other to a bigger picture, to a context."

This search for depth in the field of Sociology was followed by an exploration of different production methods in a Master's programme at the Elias Querejeta Film School, in the Basque Country. "I felt that I was becoming unfulfilled working in the standard production model, because of the frustration of needing to have a team in which there were very defined and hierarchical positions — positions that exist for a reason, I'm not devaluing that, but which limit us to a linear logic of looking at shoots." At Elias Querejeta, a school focused on shooting on film and more "impulsive" forms of filmmaking, she made When We Dead Awaken, a clear break with the style of her previous short films.

Although it had already been a theme touched on in Cabra Cega, When We Dead Awaken also represented the entry into a theme that Paula Marques had been investigating since her Sociology days: that of gender dissidence and the persecution of queer people since the time of the Inquisition. This is a theme that runs through the director's most recent film, Dildotectónica, in which she once again collaborated with actress João Abreu. João was aligned with the themes of the background research into gender dissidence. "We felt that we thought in similar ways about a lot of things and I started to share my research and the ideas I started to have with her too, and we felt a great affinity — it's a collaboration that I really value and that is very fruitful, also because we are two trans people who share a lot of experiences."

Codified emotion

João Gonzalez was also a guest at one of Batalha's New Moons in 2023, in a session that also included a musical performance by the director. This presence of music reveals a path that could perfectly well have taken another direction. He started learning to play the piano at the age of four. When he was 12, his career was interrupted by a strong commitment to professional volleyball, and he even played for Académica de São Mamede. Along the way, drawings were made, and he never lost sight of the idea of studying architecture. It's time for secondary school and João enters Science, with the intention of taking up Computer Engineering. But his Maths exam didn't go as well as he'd hoped, and he was accepted at his second option: Multimedia, at Politécnico do Porto.

Among so many possible avenues, it might seem like a mere coincidence that he ended up in animation, but in truth, animation was already waiting for João, like an old armchair that has already taken on the shape of our body. "Animation is a natural combination of everything I like to do, isn't it?" Not only did animation combine cinema, music and drawing, but it also had an essential function: control. An attraction for control is something that João Gonzalez embraces without hesitation: "I can control the sounds, I can control the timing of everything. I can know exactly how the audience will receive and interpret the story I'm telling."

This control is increased by the solitary nature of animation work, something that João values: "when I'm animating and making a film that I really like, I go into a trance-like state that wouldn't work very well with other people". He concedes, however, that there’s always a valuable team behind him, such as the team that helped with the colouring of Ice Merchants (2022).

It was, in fact, with Ice Merchants that João achieved what can only be seen as a triumph: a nomination for the Oscars for Best Animated Film. That's when the media gale came in, with interviews and explanations of who you are and what you do. But the director doesn't see a “before and after” at all. "My life hasn't changed drastically, not least because I don't want it to. I quite like my life as it is."

He confesses that this nomination was something that opened doors in the industry and talks about the surprise of "the film being distributed in cinemas for three months; something unprecedented for a short film and received with great attendance figures. A surprising thing. But I don't intend to take this as a launching point to go to Hollywood. I like my life here in Porto, and my priority is always to be able to make the films I want to make. More than making a big production for Los Angeles."