Report on the screening of REDEMPTION by Miguel Gomes

Tabu, was perhaps the most interesting and most acclaimed piece of experimental feature film released last year. This year, at the Venice Film Festival in the Giornate Degli Autori selection, Miguel Gomes presented a very inventive short work called Redemption, which is recalled the experimental nature of essay documentaries and the most clever kind of political satire. The film combines archive footage and uses voice overs, the voice overs of four different men who recall important stages in their lives which had an impact on who they became. These four men are among the most controversial and powerful politicians of the recent past and present - Pedro Passos Coelho, Silvio Berlusconi, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel.

Their voiceovers correspond to different dates and different times of their lives. In Coelho’s case, it was around the date of the Portuguese revolution and which preceded the decolonisation. In Berlusconi’s case it was around the time of the Ruby scandal. Sarkozy’s date refers to the day when he lost the French elections. Merkel’s date is meant to be the date of her first marriage, although Gomes admitted that he could not be fully sure: “Germany hides this information” he said. The film’s ironic cleverness was appreciated by the audience in attendance of the screening, which took place in the Sala Perla. Gomes was also in attendance.

“This is a lie,” he announced at his meeting with the audience that took place after the screening. “I don’t think it’s the function of the filmmakers to make trials. This is all a lie. I do not know anything about Berlusconi or Sarkozy. I know them as you know them. I may have some ideas about them but they are not better than everybody else’s. What I can propose is a lie, and the audience can take it and do whatever it wants with it.”

The juxtaposition of the archive footage and romanticised, nostalgic and sometimes even painstakingly sad voice over works very well. This is a technique that was already used successfully in other similar but very different works like Sans Soleil by Chris Marker and La Morte Rouge by Victor Erice. “I think that cinema, in its one hundred years of images, has provided us with memory of things that happened but also the memory of things that have yet to happen,” he commented. “In the Italian part of the film, we see people flying. That didn’t happen. However, in the same part we also see the hanging of Mussolini is Milan. That happened. That is real life. Both kinds of images can be used and re-used to document something that happened but also things that haven’t really happen. There is a place in people’s minds that matches reality and the imaginary when imagery is used in a playful way.”

Gomes was also asked about the editing process, and the collection of the archive footage. “I asked for general things and some more specific things. It depended on the case. But sometimes, I would get something I would not ask for and start to think that it would be better. I usually don’t like producers, but I like these ones because they have done the tough part of the job in researching from sixteen archives in Europe for the precise images. I only edited them.”

“It didn’t take long to edit the film,” he added. “What we did have to do was to rewrite some of the texts during the editing. We had the images and we tried to change the text and let the images take them. So, in the editing room, both the editor and my co-writer always sat with me.”

Redemption offers a unique vision of redemption, which recalls the ‘rosebud element’ of the Orson Welles masterpiece Citizen Kane. By doing so, it also humanizes the imagery of power and re-defines our perception of the term ‘public personality’. “The title came up very early when we were developing the original idea of having four people telling stories. These people were sad people because they were attached to something that they had lost, or were impotent. They have problems but a small problem – it’s not like they have killed anyone or they are going to die. They’re just a bit sad. That is why I picked the title redemption. Everyone can get redemption. Even these guys!”

-          Matt Micucci, 31/08/2013