HOUSEMAIDS
THE STAIRCASE 2: THE LAST CHANCE
Brazilian director Gabriel Mascaro captures the economic and social changes sweeping his country through a series of fly-on-the-wall video portraits by seven teenagers of their housemaids, touching also on how this tradition has its roots in the slave trade of another era. The film is the latest snapshot of life in Brazil from 29-yearold producer and director Mascaro, whose previous works include High-rise and Defiant Brasilia. According to 2010 statistics from the Brazilian Labour Ministry, some seven million women are employed as housemaids in Brazil, accounting for 15% of the world’s domestic staff. But as Brazil rises to be one of the biggest economies in the world, the expectations of its population are changing and the number of women prepared to go into service is on the wane. Many of the housemaid subjects in the film have been with their families since they were teenagers; one or two them entering employment when they were just eleven years old. “The housemaid is a sort of institution in Brazil. Everyone has one, not just the upper middle classes, but also the lower middle classes too. In fact, one of the teenagers who did the filming is actually the daughter of a housemaid. She films the housemaid who looks after her home while her mother is out at work”, says Mascaro. “For me, the phenomenon of the Brazilian housemaid was a good way to explore the contradictions in Brazilian society. The country has one of the biggest economies in the world today. Society is changing but there are still huge inequalities in terms of wealth and expectations. I thought the position and existence of the housemaid in our society was a good way to explore this”, he continues. “The reporters were young Brazilians between 15 to 17 years of age. I think it’s an interesting age – they’re starting to reflect on social issues but at the same time they are very, very connected to their maids, who have been with their families for years. They have this extremely complex relationship with the maids, who are at once an employee of the family but also a sort of family member”, he adds. Mascaro ended up with hundreds of hours of footage and spent a year and a half editing the documentary. “In total, we were following 25 characters from across Brazil, each one generating some 50 hours of footage”, he says. “It was a lot of work to organise the material; we
Oscar-winning French director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade revisits the case of Michael Peterson, a Tennessee writer and politician who was convicted in 2003 of murdering his wife Kathleen after she was found in a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs in their vast family home.
dealt with it on a week-by-week basis as the new footage came in.” Aside from Housemaids, Marscaro has a second film at IDFA, Ebb and Flow, which screens in the Reflecting Images – Panorama section. The 28-minute film follows a young deaf father living on the outskirts of Recife in Brazil, without comment or interviews. Beyond making documentaries, Mascaro is developing his first feature film, Bull Down!, with support from the Hubert Bals Fund. Melanie Goodfellow IDFA COMPETITION FOR FEATURE-LENGTH DOCUMENTARY Housemaids – Gabriel Mascaro Fri 16/11, 17.45, Munt 13 (industry screening) Fri 16/11, 21.45, Tuschinski 1 Sat 17/11, 18.45, Munt 10 Sun 18/11, 19.45, Tuschinski 5 Thurs 22/11, 11.15, Munt 13 Friday 23/11, 21.45, Munt 13
FIRST COUSIN ONCE REMOVED
Alan Berliner’s IDFA competition selection First Cousin Once Removed may be a complex and moving film about an everyday tragedy that befalls many – the chronic memory loss that follows the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease – but the ‘first cousin, once removed’ of the title was no everyday figure. Edwin Honig was a celebrated poet, academic and translator who was twice knighted for his services to literature: first by the president of Portugal in 1986, and then by the King of Spain a decade later. Shot over a five-year period before the poet’s death in 2011, there are many surprising elements within Berliner’s film. Despite an inability to recall faces, facts or events, Honig’s propensity for communicating in pure lyric remains a constant. Time and again, Honig will respond to a question with a clever, playful and essentially impromptu rhyme, or will encapsulate a sequence of thoughts in metaphor. Of his diminishing memory he tells how, “I have no night of what I knew in the morning.” When he is shown footage of himself as a vital and articulate academic, he intones that “who I am and who I was are two contrasting dreams.” When he is playing with Berliner’s son Eli (himself a subject within the director’s documentary Wide Awake, IDFA 2006), the poet implores the boy to “take me for a ride in your story.” “He was a master of words”, observes Berliner. “I never once went to him and spoke to him when I didn’t walk away amazed and touched and moved by some of the things that he said. Whatever happened to him, he always maintained the essence of his poetic bearing, and that was always a profound thing.” Inevitably, such an intensive study will be revelatory, and this film is no different. Among all of Honig’s lost memories, one that remains painfully unforgotten was the death of his younger brother at the age of three, run over by a car. Honig’s father blamed him for the tragedy, and the incident resonated in later life when relations soured between Honig and his own foster sons. In the film, both sons articulate their bitterness about their father’s treatment of them. “The spectre of his own childhood and the way his father blamed him, obviously there was some reworking of his child-
hood trauma, and that is always in the air (within the film)”, stresses Berliner. “He was a critical person and I think his son put it as succinctly as anyone when he said that the qualities that made him a very good critic didn’t make him a very good father.” Nevertheless, at the core of the film is a relationship between the director and his subject born out of familial love and mutual admiration. “Edwin was in many ways a collaborator with me and this film is in many ways a duet”, stresses Berliner. “You can feel the love we have for one another. He might be the subject of the film, he may even be the object of the film, but he’s also the coauthor in many ways, and I saw the possibility along with him to make a film that really would address the fragility of being human, and the deep dark spectre of mortality and ultimately, above all else, the profound role of memory, or the loss of it, in our lives. Memory is the glue of life.”
The original murder trial was at the heart of Lestrade’s hit 2004 HBO-backed miniseries The Staircase. This new one-off documentary revolves around the retrial, which began in December 2011. The Staircase series was born from Lestrade’s Oscar-winning film Murder On A Sunday Morning, following a murder trial in which a poor African-American teenager was wrongly accused of a murder in 2000. “HBO wanted me to do something else in a similar vein”, explains Lestrade. “I wasn’t convinced I could produce something as strong again on a similar subject; I decided to look for a story which was the opposite of Murder On A Sunday Morning – a rich, white person accused of committing a murder in a family setting. HBO gave me $30,000 to develop the project and, along with producer Allyson Luchak, we set up a group of researchers to look for such a case.” After about three months, the researchers came across the Peterson affair. All Lestrade knew about Peterson prior to their first meeting was that he was white, a writer and had once run for mayor in his hometown of Durham. “On meeting him, it very quickly became apparent to me that there was this almost Shakespearian dimension to Michael Peterson; a sort of ambivalence and a complexity in his character. I thought there would be dramatic turns of events in the trial, just like in a Shakespeare play.” Lestrade’s hunch proved correct. During the trial, details of Peterson’s bisexuality and extra-marital affairs emerged, and the prosecutor also delved into the case of another close friend who had also been found dead at the bottom of the stairs. “On one level, the series was about whether Peterson was guilty or not; on another, what really interested me was the motivations of the prosecution […] I had the impression he was being tried more for his private life, which they regarded as deviant, than the murder of his wife”, Lestrade says. The Staircase 2 re-explores this angle in more depth as defence lawyer David Rudolf pulls apart the evidence from the first trial. Interestingly, Rudolf builds his case using Lestrade’s rushes from the first series. “I stayed in contact with Peterson and his lawyer over the years. I was never totally convinced of Peterson’s innocence, and I told him this on several occasions, but I was convinced he should never have been convicted, because there was no evidence”, says Lestrade. Lestrade is now considering a third film exploring new evidence that has come to light since the very first trial in 2002. “Another theory that has emerged recently is that she was attacked by an owl; it’s not unheard of in the area. It may sound improbable, but it’s totally credible. I would like to make a third film looking at this theory in detail”, says Lestrade. Alongside The Staircase 2, the mini-series The Staircase also screens at IDFA. Melanie Goodfellow
IDFA COMPETITION FOR FEATURE-LENGTH DOCUMENTARY The Staircase 2. The Last Chance – Jean-Xavier de Lestrade Thurs 15/11, 15.45, Tuschinski 3 (industry screening) Wed 21/11, 16.15, Tuschinski 1 Thurs 22/11, 19.45, Tuschinski 4 Fri 29/11, 14.00, Tuschinski 2 Sat 24/11, 21.00, Munt 11
Nick Cunningham
IDFA COMPETITION FOR FEATURE-LENGTH DOCUMENTARY First Cousin Once Removed – Alan Berliner Fri 16/11, 15:45, Tuschinski 2 Sat 17/11, 11:45, Munt 12 (industry screening) Sun 18/11, 22:30, Munt 10 Tue 20/11, 11:30, Tuschinski 1 Thu 22/11, 18:00, Tuschinski 1 Sat 24/11, 10:00 ,Tuschinski 1 Sat 24/11, 10:00, Tuschinski 2 Sun 25/11, 16:30, Tuschinski 2
IDFA – 9