Portuguese filmmaker and artist Susana de Sousa Díaz has made an impassioned appeal to filmmakers to continue standing up against authoritarianism in all its forms.
“The rise of the far right, the loss of freedom and the re-emergence of censorship in democracies. This is very worrying,” de Sousa Dias, guest of honor at the Amsterdam International Documentary Festival (IDFA), said in a conversation with artistic director Isabel Arate Fernández.
The festival will feature a complete retrospective of her work, as well as 10 films that influenced her.
Describing his tenacious approach to his work, the director quotes Werner Herzog: “To become a filmmaker, he once said, you have to use up all your criminal energy.
The filmmaker spoke at length about her early films, some of which dealt with the legacy of Portuguese fascism and attempted to “fill in the gaps” in the history of that era.
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De Souza Díaz comes from a film background, as his father was a filmmaker and architect. She was 12 years old during the 1974 Portuguese Revolution, which overthrew the long-term dictatorship of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar’s Estado Novo government. During the following period, de Sousa Díaz devoted himself to cinema, viewing works by Pasolini, Fellini, Visconti, and others.
“Suddenly everything opened up. I watched everything I could,” she said of her teenage cinephilia.
Her filmmaking career began in earnest in 2001, when she was invited to make a documentary about Portuguese cinema from 1930 to 1945. Golden Age: 1930-1945.
“I went to the archives and looked at everything. I was really surprised by the images I found, especially those about former colonies,” she recalled.
Since then, much of her work uses archival materials. One of the key moments in her career was when her mother was earning a master’s degree in women’s studies and researching the story of sisters Isaura Borges Coelho and Hortensia Campos Lima, two nurses who were imprisoned in Portugal simply because they wanted to get married. This inspired de Sousa Díaz to create his own 50-minute film. Criminal case 141/53.
Making this documentary led her to explore the archives of the political police for the first time. “Once you go into the archives of the political police, you can never get out,” she reflected.
Her work there led to a famous 2005 documentary. still life, A detailed study of the 40 years of Salazar’s dictatorship. “I wanted to explain everything I could,” she said of diving headfirst into footage of one of the darkest episodes in Portugal’s history.
“If you go to the political archives, you won’t find anything about torture. You can look at reports about interrogating prisoners, but they won’t tell you that they used torture during that time. We have to bridge that gap.”
De Souza Diaz, who co-founded the production company Kintop in 2001, admitted that working with the archive was a very unsettling experience. She was using images created by the dictatorship in the film, but trying to show them in a completely different context.
The filmmakers based the 2009 feature film document 48 A combination of government mugshots of political prisoners and their audio recordings. Through the use of images and testimonies like this, she sought to convey what was really happening in the prison and fill the film with “traces” of the torture these prisoners endured.
Early in his career, de Sousa Díaz’s work was largely shunned in Portugal. Only after she gained international acclaim did local funders and organizations begin to support her.
“I had a really hard time in Portugal (in the industry),” she said. “They wouldn’t finance[me]. Even with Arte[backing]and a super French producer, I didn’t have any money. All the film festivals rejected the film… it was terrible. The only reason I was able to make the film… was because it was internationally recognized.”
Now, she says, “Not at all.”
De Sousa Dias’ latest feature document, fordlandia panaceawill make its world premiere this week at IDFA’s Envision Competition. This is a sequel to her previous work, fordlandia malaysialooks at Henry Ford’s failed utopian dream of building a rubber factory in the Brazilian jungle.
