Behind the Scenes at Short Film “Nigredo”

In early 2018, seven short film projects from the interior of Paraná were awarded funding by the state’s Secretary of Culture. One of these films focuses on the heavy weight of Brazil’s dictatorial past: directed by Auber Silva, Nigredo promises to take a unique approach to the country’s legacy of authoritarianism.

Auber Silva is a filmmaker and journalist from Londrina, Paraná. The film, whose title refers to decomposition in Latin alchemy, will be released at the end of 2018.

Artememoria’s Lara Norgaard went to the set of Nigredo to watch the shooting of one of the short’s surrealist scenes. She spoke to Director Auber Silva about his angle on the historical subject matter. Read on for the conversation with Silva and behind the scenes photos.

 Artememoria: Describe Nigredo. What is the film’s premise?

Auber Silva: The short is essentially about a grandfather. We slowly get to know him and find out that he worked in a government office at the time of the dictatorship. It’s never identified which exact sector it is, the Department of Social and Political Order or the Department of Information Operations, but he doesn’t directly come into contact with interrogation, torture, or execution. He’s an archivist. He dealt with the files of the people being investigated, who would later be imprisoned, tortured, and killed. He doesn’t care. He isn’t conscious about what he does.

One day, the character ends up with the file of a girl he doesn’t know. But when he sees it, he knows it’s someone who is being investigated. Maybe it’s because of the girl’s gaze, or because she seems to carry some sort of purity, some kind of goodness, but he realizes that he is part of a machine that imprisons, tortures, and kills people. He tries, in his own way, to hide the file, hoping that without the investigation she might be spared, that her life might be saved. He ends up not being able to save her and in a way, that means he also he can’t save himself. He carries this guilt to the present day.

In terms of films about the dictatorship, this short takes on a point of view of the people who were part of the oppression and who didn’t say no. It isn’t trying to justify anything, but instead it tries to show the consequences of that lack of action. The people who were part of it were aware of what was going on, but they continued on with their lives as though nothing were taking place.

Today, we know that a lot of people worked in state agencies under the dictatorship, in agencies designed to repress and to kill people. Those former employees are alive today. There was no punishment for them, and now they go about their everyday lives without any consequence. So, our film raises the following question: we still haven’t been able to hold people responsible, but could it be that those who were involved suffer from a guilty conscience? That’s our premise. We want viewers to come to their own conclusions about whether the repression, torture, and murder weigh on the conscience of people who formed part of the authoritarian system now, after decades have passed.

Artememoria: How did you get the idea to approach the topic of dictatorship from that angle?

Silva: Today, we are experiencing a moment of huge political tension, not just in Brazil but also in the world. There is so much polarization, with one side pulling towards the right, an extreme right that’s very strong and that is entering the presidency of various countries. Trump in the United States is an example. In Brazil, our elections are coming up in October. We don’t know what will happen, but we can already see that one candidate similarly represents the far right and uses a fascist discourse of hate and fear.

We felt like we needed to make this film because of the moment of polarization. It’s a way of dealing with the present by looking into our past. The Brazilian military dictatorship is relatively recent. People who were there and who participated in the violence are still alive. They continue to go about their lives. It’s a wound that hasn’t healed for Brazilians. So, we decided to look to that past, to see how that tragedy reached such an extreme point, and then to bring that into the present day.

It’s important to think about the past to understand the path that we are taking now. It seems as though we live in cycles. Brazil is cycling back to a context of fascism, a military government, dictatorship. And though today people have information and awareness of this history, or at least access to that information, there are many who want to return to that system. There are people who make choices based on fear and hate, based on an ignorance of the other. That’s the grounding for fascism. Fascism only exists where there is fear.

Artememoria: As a director, what choices allow you to make this historical topic feel relevant to a contemporary audience?

Silva: Beyond our serious and realistic treatment of the period, we also have a few scenes that deal with the character’s subconscious. They’re his moments of delirium. It is through these scenes that we find out what happened, what the character did and didn’t do, how he didn’t save the girl. We see the action that never came to be, the one that would have saved her. Saving the girl represents saving many people, since her fate signified that the regime was murderous. We shot these parts of the film with a kind of surrealism, as though we were diving into the character’s conscience. We mix realism with the surrealism of the subconscious, and maybe also with expressionism. It symbolizes the character’s conscience that weighs on him for the actions he took.

Artememoria: Are there any films, plays, novels, or other art forms that influence the way you represent this period of Brazil’s history? 

Silva: I didn’t choose many Brazilian references so as not to repeat what has already been done in representations of the dictatorship. Instead, I’m trying to use a more distant style while working with Brazilian subject matter. I try to incorporate elements from other languages. For example, in the scene shot today, the typewriter scene, there’s a theatrical reference to Samuel Beckett, to absurdity. Kafka is also an influence in the sense of repetition, in the representations of bureaucracy, in the sense that the character is a prisoner to the system and that there is no way out. That’s why the background in the scene is all white. It creates the feeling of something infinite and inescapable.

As for cinemagraphic references, we use Orson Welles’ The Trial, which is a film adaptation of Kafka’s book. We also think about John Frankenheimer’s Seconds, which is one part of the North American paranoia trilogy. We bring in these foreign references and this cinemagraphic language that we find interesting to work with our own Brazilian topics.

Artememoria: Foreign references make sense, given that the inspiration for the film, this present wave of authoritarianism, is global.

Silva: In this moment of authoritarianism, fascism, political tension, and polarization, this film places hope in the individual. There’s no way to have everyone change at once, to have some decree that suddenly states, starting now, that this isn’t right. So we focus on one individual, the choices he makes, and the consequences of his actions. Our intention is to show a shift in his character, a kind of growth and an act of pushing against society. Those are choices that come from the individual.

We want to move towards tolerance, understanding, and solidarity. Maybe then we will be able to build better lives, both in Brazil and elsewhere. And so in this film we focus on the individual, on passivity in moments of polarization, when one doesn’t take a side, doesn’t help, doesn’t work to stop what is going on. When you do nothing, you end up drifting with the current. And right now, the current is pulling us towards intolerance, fear, and hate.

This interview, translated to the Portuguese by Lara Norgaard, was edited and condensed for clarity.

Interested in film? Watch Memory Machine, Artememoria’s video through documentary film director Silvio Tendler’s personal archive.