Interview Alejandro Landes (“Porfirio”)

Amsterdam, EYE Film Institute, August 16, 2011

“The most important thing is to convey a feeling”

Producer sensations

The young Ecuadorian-Colombian director Alejandro Landes, who grew up in Brazil and works in Argentina, did not immediately expect that his first fiction film ‘Porfirio’ would be so successful in Europe, but he is not really surprised either. After his first film ‘Cocalero’, a documentary about Bolivian president Evo Morales, he completed his first feature film four years later. ‘Porfirio’, based on true events, shows the protagonist of the same name in his home in Colombia for over a hundred minutes, where he – after an accident – ​​is condemned to his four walls and the veranda spends his days increasingly desperate in a wheelchair.

Landes mainly wanted to convey a feeling, more than telling events or spreading a message. Through his previous work as a journalist, he has noticed that the worlds of reality and fiction are often closely intertwined, and that this is not a bad thing. He therefore makes no distinction between ‘real’ and ‘made up’. He got the idea for the film in 2005 through a short news story about an invalid man who had wanted to hijack a domestic flight in Colombia, his diapers full of dynamite and his goal finally brought attention to his case from the government. Instead, he was given a prison sentence in the form of house arrest.

Landes left a few months after he saw the news for Florencia, a small town in the Colombian jungle, where Porfirio Ramírez lived as a prisoner in his own house. “There was not a very smooth contact between us right away,” says Landes, “but I decided to stay in Florencia and after five months of intensive contact Porfirio had thawed and I could start filming.” These months were very valuable to Landes, he says, because he got to know Porfirio’s personal drama more than any other aspect of the film. “I could have made a film about the actual hijacking, so to speak, or about the events that led to Porfirio ending up in a wheelchair.” Instead, Landes chose to give a beautiful yet subtle look at the human story and more importantly, human emotion. In this regard, Landes is not interested in genres either, he says, in response to the question of whether he feels more at home in fiction or non-fiction. “Documentaries or fiction films, in the end it’s all about one thing: producir sensaciones, or creating emotion.”

Florencia – kitsch in the jungle

Landes found a house in Florencia where he wanted to shoot the film and asked Porfirio himself, his youngest son who plays the role of the eldest son who was actually an accomplice in Porfirio’s “crime”, and a girl next door, to live in the house. “After a few weeks, the three of them got used to each other, to me and to the cameras, and that was exactly the point. I worked out the script carefully, but I deliberately gave Porfirio and the other two actors the space to come up with their own input. That’s how sometimes unexpected things happened on the set.”

“I tried to capture the atmosphere that the town of Florencia conveys in the film,” Landes explains. “The city – a transit point and trading town – is like a no man’s land, the land belongs to everyone and nobody at the same time. Because there is quite a bit of money involved in the small town, it sometimes has an unnaturally kitschy appearance.” This is indeed noticeable in certain scenes in the film, when Porfirio visits a law firm, for example.
Cinematography and Themes

“Cinematographically, I made some very conscious choices. First of all, I shot film in cinemascope format, something that is anything but common in Colombia. In addition, I have constantly used Porfirio’s perspective. Anyone who steps outside the box literally falls outside Porfirio’s life. I wanted to convey that discomfort to the viewer.” The pace of the film also reflects Porfirio’s life in this way, in which the hours often slip by slowly like molasses, in which nothing happens and nothing essential changes. “I played with the concept of time a lot to get this portrayed in the film.”

The film as a whole has a clear cyclical narrative that will not go unnoticed by any viewer. “Indeed, the beginning and the end are identical, literally. Porfirio ends up in the same position where he started. And yet something small has changed. Porfirio’s seemingly small win is his big win and the big difference in the end. He has regained his identity, regained himself.” In that sense, the film definitely has a certain positive force.

According to Landes, the metaphor of captivity has no political meaning, but is mainly about the human drama of a man like Porfirio. Porfirio felt a precarious situation after the incident in which a police bullet left him paralyzed in a wheelchair, trapped in his body for years, confined to his house and more or less stuck. When he finally decides to stop taking it and take matters into his own hands, he literally ends up imprisoned, punished by the state with years of house arrest that he has to serve at home.

No compassion

“Anyone left with a feeling of pity after the film has not been paying attention,” says Landes. “That’s the last thing that matters to Porfirio. His dignity is all that remains to him after his wife, his health and his wealth have been taken from him.” Partly for this reason, Landes decided to include the sex scenes in the film. “Nobody ever thinks that someone in a wheelchair just has needs and desires. Suddenly ceasing to be a sexual being is a very painful topic for most people who end up in a wheelchair. Those scenes may have been a bit uncomfortable for both Porfirio and his much younger neighbor Jasbleidy at first, but according to Landes they were filmed with the greatest possible care and subtlety.

“With proceeds from the film, Porfirio wanted to start a bar, rather: a billiard cafe, at home. He built a floor on top of his existing house, to turn the ground floor into a café and to live upstairs himself. However, he had forgotten for a moment that he could not climb stairs.” Landes tells this anecdote with visible emotion about the man with whom he has worked closely in recent years. “He is still not used to his condition, but he is showing a zest for life that he lost after his sentence.” This is partly why Landes has Porfirio interpret some scenes in singing. “Porfirio actually wanted to be a Vallenato singer, and suddenly came up with these songs himself. During the intimate scenes with Jasbleidy, he spontaneously started singing, beautifully.”

The future

In Colombia, the film will probably be released in early 2012, at the nationally renowned film festival in the coastal city of Cartagena. “Colombia still lacks a solid foundation for independent cinema, but this has changed in recent years,” says Landes. He thinks the audience will appreciate his film through the emotions the story evokes and the recognition of everyday Colombian reality. “It may be difficult to reach a large audience because there are no cinemas showing ‘arthouse’ films, but the Colombian public seems to appreciate the national cinema.” Whether the film will be widely discussed in media remains to be seen, but Landes doesn’t seem too preoccupied with these kinds of predictions.

Landes has no plans for a new project either. “In the coming months I will be so busy with the distribution and launch of Porfirio in various places. And can I first enjoy a finished production and the success that the film has already achieved worldwide?” Landes laughs. It is very much granted to him.