When I decided to make the trip to the Middle East, as part of research for the filmeLavoura Arcaica, I had already outlined in the romance, the structure of the film, that is, the main coordinates of the text on which Raduan Nassar worked. So we clung to them and made the trip to the Middle East and then to Andalusia, trying to find there, mirrored in Mediterranean culture, the ancestry of the coordinates of the text.

What would love be from the point of view of a young shepherd in northern Lebanon? This is practically a mythical question for them, a question that seemed to us to be given to a force majeure, a question that would belong to a fate already written, and they only have to accept it. We ask them: faced with something as devastating, how would be, or what would be the relationship with love, freedom, affections, borders? What struggle was going on inside them, how do they deal with what is inevitable, tragic for them? And how does this struggle, which translates into survival, take place in their imaginary?

This approach to earth, in my way of feeling, is on a symbolic plane – or mythical if you prefer. It will always be an element of spiritual order, where I will connect, whatever the territory, in any geography. So my reference in those days was indeed supported in the backcountry universe of Brazil. I found myself translating those relationships and human types into my memory of a northeast. We were in the Mediterranean, finding this connection, which I had always made in an intuitive way.

On the other hand, I was absolutely aware that I was excavating a Brazilian film, or, in other words, I went to the Middle East, Lebanon and Syria to see, in order to know, to have contact with those visibilities, and then make them disappear here, in the making of the film; so that they would suffer the natural process of miscegenation, a kind of disappearance. As Alceu Amoroso Lima says, deciphering Raduan’s novel: “In a very Brazilian soul, but dominated by a breath of classical Mediterranean tradition”. So, for the set design, I would like to transmit a space, as the costume, for the performance of the actors, for everything in itself, a breath of Mediterranean, as if in the film there was a Mediterranean soul opposite the Brazilian soul, an atmosphere, something that didn’t reach the descriptive level, nothing you could point to. There would not be just a spiritual and invisible dialogue between these two visibilities.