Last week my friend, Miguel Cravo, and I started a film project for a competition Micro Films para Macro Causes.
[João Marrana]
The truth is we aren’t all the same. And we aren’t all the same in any way.
The people lived in their places, they had their spaces and friendships already established, and suddenly the municipality says: “For your own good, you will now have a nice home and will move to Ameixoeira, to Chelas, to…”
So there is a relationship of neighbourhood, of mutual help, of complicity, of friendship, which is destroyed once you take the horizontal and turn it into the vertical.
The quarter is dirty, it’s filthy, but the residents’ own houses are clean. Therefore the quarter of those people is only their own house from the walls inward. From the walls outward is not theirs. If we don’t find a mechanism for them to identify themselves with their own quarter, the house will always be clean, but the street will be forever dirty.
[Livia Tirone]
The people who come from simple, rural communities are people who learned to feel confidence only towards their familiar aggregate. When they are introduced into a part of a city they have to feel confidence towards a larger aggregate. This demands from them certain skills which if they don’t have the facility to learn they can’t create the bridge to their quarter.
[João Marrana]
In those 1000 [One Thousand] homes you didn’t see even one grocery store, one café, or one supermarket. You didn’t see anything, there is nothing.
This isn’t an agreeable way to live; we wouldn’t like to live in a place like this.
[Livia Tirone]
And one of the levels on which it is reflected is in that relationship which is sometimes symbolized by elements like meters. And the meters in the houses we saw, practically all were being hoodwinked by stealing the resource before it goes through the meter.
But in the case of electricity and gas it can actually put the peoples lives at risk, not only the ones stealing it, but everyone else around them.
We saw that the elevators didn’t work in most the buildings we visited, and they stopped working also because of lack of knowledge, because these people don’t know how to work with elevators.
[João Marrana]
And that is where we come back to the old question: ‘Is it the people who are bad, who are uncivilized because they wreck everything, destroy and do, or is it us who when we called them to this new model of life didn’t impose on them the social rules of our city, as well as the utility and usufruct of what we gave them?’
If we can come down to earth, relate and be able to communicate with them, which is the hardest part, we will be able to make them feel respected and get their respect in turn. Our function is for the people to find their way; we just have to give them the tools to find it, as it’s them who define it, not us. Each person is one person, every case is one case, every family is one family and families aren’t to be put in a pot.
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It has been a very rewarding experience as I got to have a glimpse into editing and I got to really work for the first time with Miguel. It’s been a lot of work, but a lot of fun, and we got to look into a reality that we wouldn’t have thought to graze the surface of otherwise. If you go to the “read more” part you will find the English transcript to the film, as the film is in Portuguese, which many times contains more or less direct translations. Please vote for it under “Vote neste video”, which you can find if you click on the video itself. I hope you like it.
