Muanza is a woman born in the Kingdom of Kongo and trafficked to Brazil sometime in the 19th century. Waking up in the 21st century, she finds herself in a bustling Rio de Janeiro. Figures from the past and from the present come into her search for her roots across the city. This is the intriguing premise of Julia De Simone’s first feature “Praia Formosa,” which played in the Tiger Competition of this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam (25 January-5 February).
Described as “a portrait of the experiences and struggles that create community and sisterhood,” the Brazilian-Portuguese co-production stars Lucília Raimundo, Maria D’Aires, Samira Carvalho and Mãe Celina de Xangô in the leading roles. Towards the end of the Dutch festival, we reached out to De Simone to dig deep into the making of her complex debut feature.
Your film is the last installment of a trilogy, and the result of a long research process on the history of Rio de Janeiro and its urbanization process. Could you please touch on your research work, and tell us what prompted you to make “Praia Formosa”?
I started filming in the port region in 2012 because it was the beginning of a very large urban transformation. At first, I was simply interested in understanding what was going on. When they started ‘transforming’ the area, they discovered this Valongo port, which is a little harbor in Rio de Janeiro where all enslaved people were gathered. That’s also the reason why this area is known as ‘Little Africa,’ owing to its large presence of Black people, which continues today. When I started my research, I realized that the most recent urban transformations as well as the others that happened over the last 200 years were attempts of erasing these people’s history – a history of slavery for Black people. We also wanted to explore this idea of progress, which always ‘heads’ towards the future while erasing the past. Then we deepened our research on the colonial times and people coming to Brazil from Africa, focusing on the Bantus from the Kingdom of Kongo. They’re an important part of Rio de Janeiro’s culture and what we are as a society today.
Why did you choose the 1:37 format?
I chose it for two main reasons. I think that the first time we see Muanza stuck in the mansion, the format works well because it makes her figure look smaller but, at the same time, when she goes out of the house and ventures into the city, we also notice the height of the buildings. So we did a lot of camera tests with our DP. This squared format emphasizes how imposing are the buildings, and in some way it helps us to ‘look vertically.’ So the 1:37 format worked nicely in different ways, both indoor and outdoor.
I’d like to focus on the scene in which we see Muanza dancing in the middle of the street. How did you work on staging that? Did you involve a choreographer?
Yes, that was taken care of by Flavia Sousa. She’s a choreographer and the movement director of the whole movie. She created the choreography of that scene by watching different movies featuring all kinds of Black dances – funk, samba, breaking, orisha and so on. She’s built it by combining all of those movements, and taught Lucília how to perform it. It’s a very crucial moment, since it unfolds as soon as she ventures into the city. I think she’s transforming this city, this territory through herself. She also turns herself into a contemporary woman. Also, the place where she’s dancing is exactly the new avenue that was built after the explosion seen at the start of the movie. They blew up a stretch of highway to build this new avenue, and by dancing, I think she’s trying to make that territory alive again. She’s trying to turn it into something sacred.
How did you share writing duties with Aline Portugal and Mariana Luiza?
It’s been a very long process. We were developing the project and the script for about eight years. It took a long time for us to find financing, and the first development grant we received was provided by the Hubert Bals Fund. So we were researching and writing the script at the same time. And, as the research progressed bringing in new insights and new materials, we had to change the script. For example, there’s this scene in which three characters are in this church and they’re talking directly to the camera while they’re reading a long letter. That letter is based on real documents written in first person by enslaved people. Moreover, we consulted with a historian called Luis Antonio Simas. He knows everything about the history of Rio de Janeiro. At that time, our main character wasn’t a Bantu woman. And he told us that Rio de Janeiro is bound to what we are, it is the way it is because of Bantu culture. So we changed her origins, and we began studying the Bantu cosmogony. For example, we understood that Bantus conceive time as a spiral. And what we tried to do was to write the script in a ‘spiraling’ fashion, so that past, present and future are interconnected. So one can pass through the same places but they’re always transformed, at least to some extent. That’s idea of ‘spiraling’ time. And that’s not a circle, because you will never come back to the same spots. Therefore, when we realized that Muanza had to be a Bantu woman, it totally changed both the script and our understanding of time.
