Kleber Mendonca Filho found inspiration very close to home
When Brazilian film maker Kleber Mendonca Filho started filming the middle class street he lives in, he could not have imagined his first feature film would bring so much international acclaim.
Now at the Sydney Film Festival, Neighbouring Sounds has already been screened at ten international festivals. The film won a prize at the Rotterdam International Film Festival for evoking an atmosphere of paranoia and menace through a highly ambitious use of sound and cinematography.
It is shot in a single street in Recife, Brazil, where things take an unexpected turn after the arrival of an independent private security firm. Their presence brings a sense of safety but also a good deal of anxiety to a culture that runs on fear.
“The film is very truthful about the way we live, our lives and society in Brazil,” Mendonca Filho told MegaphoneOZ. “It is not like an expose; it addresses violence but there is not a gun or a knife in the film.”
Nonetheless, through the sound track and a juxtaposition of people doing ordinary things like domestic chores or having sex, the film creates an atmosphere of menace.
“I wouldn’t be interested in making a film where you would have people shooting each other. There is a scene in the film where two security guys are dozing off. They are watching the street at night and a car passes by and everybody seems to think something really awful is going to happen – but it doesn’t.”
This Brazilian film maker is fascinated by urban legends like the ‘little cotton girl’, the inspiration for one of his short films on child disappearances, and ‘spider boy’ who is a character in Neighbouring Sounds.
“Spider Boy was a real child thief who used to climb high-rises in the sector where I live, a kind of middle to upper class area. For the bourgeois inhabitants of this area, height means security. The higher you are the safer you feel. This kid was 14 or 15 years old but he terrorised the area.
“Terrorise is the right word, for the rich people. But it wasn’t really terror. Sometimes he would just climb up and help himself from the fridge and then fall asleep.”
In real life Spider Boy died in a hail of bullets at the age of 18 after he was caught breaking and entering about 200 metres from Mendonca Filho’s front door.
“I was very interested in this real urban legend and a very good friend of mine did a short film called Spider Boy and I decided to write about this strange character. He is filmed like some sort of apparition, almost like a ghost. It feels like he is a ghost, because he just found ways of getting inside people’s homes.
“I’m married to a French girl and I get to travel a lot. The normal thing is to be able to walk around at night. But it is dangerous in Brazil or we think it is dangerous. So there is no one on the streets at night because everybody thinks it is dangerous and it is dangerous because there is no one on the streets at night.”
Neighbouring Sounds screens at the Sydney Film Festival at 6.15 pm on Friday June 15 at the State Theatre and at 11.45 am on Saturday June 16 at Event Cinemas George Street.
