Carlos Melim is a young Portuguese filmmaker who debuted "from me." A short film that already won a number of awards and has even been selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Focusing on the inner crowned pictures and landscapes that take us to the solitude and introspection. His second film work, "complete remission" is coming soon to cinemas.
Would you have written "from me" if you were not Madeiran? If you were not islander?
Carlos Melim: Madeira was the main "scenario" main because it was where I was born, where I have my roots, my family, my first love ... The film is about loneliness and pain, and some of that sense of loss had much to do with the fact that I left Madeira and being away from what I knew (my comfort zone). Most of the film was shot on the island because it was "back home" where I returned to rediscover me ... But if I born elsewhere and had left that place and my family to follow a dream, would have written in it the same, the scenario would be another. I think the insular nature of Madeira reinforces the film's emotional charge. The fact that we isolated reinforces the dramatic charge ...
It is a letter of farewell or love?
CM: It's a bit of both. .. The film can be a farewell letter if it feel that I die in the end ... or it may be a love letter ... or a message of life ... depends on how each one feels the film. For me it was a therapy. It was a way of finding me. It was necessary to be sad and feel yourself to move forward, and that is the message that liked to stay in the film. We all have a stage in life when we think about giving up, but it is in us that is the strength to continue, and not in others.
It was difficult to expose this way your feelings? It's roughly a catharsis?
CM: I've never seen the "me" as an exhibition. I was doing the movie for me. There are people who write letters, I make movies ... Only when I showed a friend and she encouraged me to disclose it, is that I first thought to share it with the general public. If the movie helped a person who is thinking of giving up on life, then all the sessions I attended embarrassed, stuck in a chair, have paid off!
What do you feel when your watch again this first film? Was there anything you would like to change or improve? Why?
CM: Today I cannot feel what I felt at the time, but did not change anything. I like more and more of the film. The most important is that it is genuine, and it was what I felt at the time. I find it to be genuine that can touch people.
Complete remission is another intimate short film?
CM: The "Complete Remission" is fiction. Anyway, I think that says a lot to me as a filmmaker ... It's about the topics I like to approach, people, society, emotions ... relations.
