script and direction: Vera Mantero and Miguel Gonçalves Mendes
actors: Vera Mantero, Ariana Maia, Iúri Peres, Rafael Bouça Nova, Raquel Pinto, Rodrigo Laranjeira, Telma Cruz
photography direction: Edmundo Diaz
art direction: Paulo Reis
sound direction: Filipe Tavares
editing: Cláudia Rita Oliveira and Vera Mantero
direction manager: Ana Jordão and Patrícia Romão
production: O Rumo do Fumo oraz JumpCut
duration: 45 min
Vera Mantero and Miguel Gonçalves Mendes were invited by the Festival Temps d’Images, in a co-production with the Circular-Festival of Performative Arts, to present a joint creation where they were asked to cross the areas in which each one works – Cinema and Dance.
From this invitation emerges “Silence Course’, two films based on the imagetic universe of Maria Gabriela Llansol.
The development of this screenplay set off from different books and interviews by the author that allowed not only a transversal approach to her work but also allowed working on one of the author’s main ideas, the so called ‘glow scenes’. These are nuclear images where temporality or spatiality are inexistent. The logic of the sequence in which these scenes are organized escapes the the readers’ comprehension (here spectators’), therefore disabling its classification.
The text of Maria Gabriela Llansol isn’t carried out by thematic developments, nor through a plot, but through a thread that binds the different glow scenes that compose it. It’s this type of writing that we seek in the construction of these films. The nucleus of the glow scenes can be an image, a thought, or an intensely emotional feeling. Thus, more than to search for a story, we’re looking for gestures, actions, sensations and emotions that once explored may carry us into the possible ‘edenic space’ that Llansol talks about. These films, as her books, refuse the metaphor. Everything is composed of fragments only understandable in the globality of the reading.
After a process of shooting in common, Miguel Gonçalves Mendes and Vera Mantero materialized the present co-creation in two different versions with the same name ‘Curso de Silêncio’ (Silence Course).
Therefore, in spite of the same shooting material, the editing of each one of the films corresponds to the personal vision of each one of these creators on the work of Maria Gabriela Llansol.