Berlin 2005: The Talent Press

Walter Salles
Talks about the Talent Campus
By Myrna Silveira Brandão

Brazilian director Walter Salles, together with costume designer Emi Wada and art director Dante Ferreti were the hosts and tutors of the Berlin Talent Campus, a course for young filmmakers that is an important part of the Berlinale.

The program, which started at the 2003 edition of the festival, had 530 participants this year, coming from more than 90 different countries worldwide. The program, which was organized at the Berlin House of World Cultures, was composed of several seminaries and panels on a variety of themes, tutored by many professionals of cinema. Among others:

"Composer and Director: Exploring the Collaboration", with Mike Figgis and Walter Salles;
"Painting With the Camera", with Christopher Doyle on his outstanding art of creating pictures for the screen;
"Film Sets Are Forever", with the legendary set designer Sir Ken Adam;
"Directing Sex", about ways of directing intimacy for the screen, with Catherine Breillat;
and "The Critics Know Best", a discussion with Michel Ciment, Dai Jinhua and festival guests about the self-conception of film critics.

Coming from London, where he received the BAFTA Award for the best foreign film and the best soundtrack for his Motorcycle Diaries, Salles spoke to us about his participation in the Talent Campus, as well as his future projects.

According to him, the Talent Campus is of an extraordinary importance and also represents a unique opportunity for the hosts of the program to work with young talents. "The international festivals are changing in order to incorporate new preoccupations, besides only exhibiting films. This happens at Sundance, through the Institute, and at Cannes, through the Ciné Fondation. Here in Berlin, in the last three years, we have witnessed the most complete of these programs, getting together more than 500 students to think about cinema and also to have the opportunity to make films during and for the Talent Campus. I had the chance of seeing and following some excellent works here, and this brings much optimism. It shows that independent cinema has a long life ahead".

The program conducted by Walter Salles included the panel "Reality and Fiction", suggesting a careful look between the very thin lines that separate today fiction and documentary. But the director does not think that this is a new phenomenon: "It happens since cinema is cinema. It was already present in the work of important documentaries like Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North, shot in 1922", said Salles, adding a citation from Jean-Luc Godard: "He says that every good fictional film goes in the direction of the documentary and every good documentary goes in the direction of the fiction film. And that every time you dive deeply in one of those two genders you find the other". Salles showed his short documentary Life Somewhere Else (Socorro Nobre, 1995) during the seminary.

In another event, Walter Salles and Mike Figgis were the special guests of the seminary "Composer and Director: Exploring the Collaboration", on the influence and the decisive role music plays in films. In the text prepared by the organizers, Salles — who won the Golden Bear with Central Station (Central do Brasil) in 1998 — is remembered as a director whose work demonstrates the close relation between images and soundtrack. "Figgis, for me, is the only director that can say to the composer, with all the conviction of the world, how he wants the track of his films to be done", says Salles.

Together with his brother, the documentary filmmaker João Moreira Salles, Walter Salles has developed an active work to promote and produce films made by young Brazilian directors. For him, the more experienced filmmakers, specially those coming from poorer countries, have a mission to persecute in that area: "I come from a part of the world where there are more talented directors than conditions for them to express their talent. Therefore, I feel the responsibility of trying to help those young directors", said he.

At the moment, he is busy with launching his newest film, Dark Water, and with the finalization of Paris, je t'aime (a collective work made by twenty directors and shot at a mythical location: Paris), besides the development of his new low budget movie, Linha de Passe. The story will be about street boys that try to overcome the social differences in different ways. The direction will be shared with Daniela Thomas, his partner also in Foreign Land (Terra estrangeira, 1996), the sensitive film about exile.

Myrna Silveira Brandão
© FIPRESCI 2005

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