Photo: Maurilio Almeida

Photo: Ricardo Ara

Photo: Lauro Maia

Photo: Yule Aureh

TRAILER

COMENTÁRIO DES ARTISTAS

Gabriela Lamas, Maurílio Almeida and Felipe Yurgel made several online meetings to write "I am not a robot". The film was then shot with a three-people crew: the director Gabriela Lamas; the screenwriter Maurílio Almeida, who also portrays the characters Tânia and Mosca, and the director of photography, Lívia Pasqual. WhatsApp audios of friends being interpreted through a hidden headset in addition to free talks about what Gabriela was thinking at the time composed the dialogues of I am not a robot, with a chattering character unwilling to listen, who finds a "friendly shoulder", or more than that, in a fly that rummages her garbage. With references to the work of David Cronenberg and some rough special effects made by the force of will, amid the boom of podcasts and series, everything blended with the fanciful animated podcast The Midnight Gospel. Regarding the fly, this fantastic being: there were many discussions to delimit the character's personality and the limits of his physics. We chose to provide concrete and "realistic" reasons for the presence of the fly in Tania's apartment (to feed on her garbage and wait while the queue decreases in another apartment where other flies feed on a decomposing body). We chose to provide not a human voice for the fly, but sounds created by a musical instrument - a double bass, electric and acoustic - by decision of Guilherme Ceron, who created and recorded the soundtrack and voice of the fly. These sounds were then subtitled with the translation of the fly's lines, in order to maintain a similar rhythm and sonority to a talking voice.

FELIPE YURGEL ON THE PROCESS OF " I AM NOT A ROBOT”: "I am not a robot" comes from the desire to keep working with Gabriela and Maurilio. In the middle of 2020, after the production of the short film "Lá Embaixo é uma Linha Reta" / "Down there is a straight line", which we made for the band As Longas Viagens, we understood that, with the limitations imposed by the pandemic, the long-distance production whose communications were done entirely in a virtual environment was a means to feel close to each other and to move a little bit away from the sense of "end of the world" that still takes over the country. We met up via zoom and summed up the ideas that ended up resulting in "I am not a robot." Maurilio had an idea about a person who cannot solve a captcha and this event serves to question the humanity of that person. Gabriela had an idea of telling the story of a woman who, in isolation, noticed an invasion of flies in the building where she lives and began an investigation about the motive, the death of a lady who had also been isolated. When the fly idea came up, I remembered a distant time where we were able to be together. At one of these meetings, Gabriela showed us a fly head she had produced. I remembered her talking with the fly's head, and suggested that the character would communicate with this fly, develop a relationship with it, and, bringing Maurilio's idea in, would put her humanity to the test, reflecting on what's real and what is the life we live. We put the three ideas together and in two weeks we had produced "I am not a robot". They were in Porto Alegre and I in Pelotas. Transferences of files in the cloud. Meetings via zoom. Good laughs and problems of adaptation to the possible means of communication and regarding the distance between the editor and the director in the editing process governed the process of production of this film in an era that we hope will go away soon.

MAURÍLIO ON “I AM NOT A ROBOT”: I had a script called "I am not a robot" about a character suffering a panic attack in a large office when she can't solve a captcha test. During the panic episode, the character questions everything around her and the possibility of not being really human. Another trigger was the office's guard, who was going to actually look half robotic, half zombie. However, after a conversation between them, it would be revealed that the guard actually works two shifts and never sleeps, his robotic aspect being the result of the double-shift working day. That is, the idea was to talk about the exploitation of the labor force, alienation, and other consequences brought by technological revolutions in contrast to labor rights and workers welfare.

When the pandemic started and we decided to make a short film, this script was the one we chose to work on. However, home office and new working relationships was already a reality of the pandemic. In addition, confinement forced us to adapt our idea to the new reality. Gabriela Lamas brought a story idea in which many flies would begin to appear in the character's apartment during the pandemic and, after a while, she would begin to speculate that some neighbor had died and was decomposing, but no one could leave their homes to deal with it. It was a good idea, and Felipe Yurgel was already imagining a human fly that would talk to the character, bringing a surrealist and almost comic element to the story. Therefore, "I am not a robot" came from these three ideas and evolved from this.

After the trigger caused by the inability to solve the captcha test, the character finds a fly in her kitchen and they start talking about many subjects.

For the dialogues between the characters, we thought of asking some acquaintances to send us whatsapp audios of their thoughts and experience on many topics that interested us in the process: the pandemic, perception of reality, politics, food, etc., and these audios would serve as material for the film.

The series "Midnight Gospel" was an influence for this process of collective creation ​of dialogues. Another important aspect for the creation of the story was the decision to transform the character's loneliness, perhaps motivated by social isolation or just as a paradigmatic symptom of human distancing in times of hyper-connectivity, into an almost loving relationship between her and the fly, causing Tânia to decide to tear off her finger in the hope of receiving another visit from the fly and escape again to the isolation environment.

GABRIELA LAMAS ABOUT PROCESSES AND ABOUT MASKS: I have been interested in masks. I like to create things with my hands, and that's one of my biggest interests in the Art department: to think about things I can create with my hands. To try materials, think forms, both for effects (be them rough or not) and for props. Masks, which are a way of wearing art on the face, have been in my mind for a few years, especially with animal features and forms. I remember the carnivals from my childhood years in São Lourenço do Sul, where people wore pillowcases with holes for eyes and tied-up ears as masks, pretending to be what they were not.

Masks were eventually banned because seemingly they caused a lot of problems to keep everything in order. What does a mask do to whoever wears it?

The fly mask was created in this process, and I didn't even know where I'd use it. It was made of papier-mache, liquid latex, and shiny fabrics for the eyes. It hung around our house, being used in strange moments as dinners with friends. Of course it was a clear reference to Cronenberg's fly, but I wanted to try to be faithful to the anatomy of an actual fly head, and that was quite reminiscent of the previous Fly films, such as the 1958 one, directed by Kurt Neumann. With the comedy of the special effects of the time. In my experiments with masks, I made a mask about the restoration of the Ecce Homo painting (the meme), which was used in cover photos of two albums of the band As Longas Viagens, in a collective concept creation with Ricardo Ara and Maurílio Almeida. The mask was made of papier-mache, and became a character in the albums. I also created masks for the As Tubas's show "Corpo-Espaço". These were made of doll pieces, magazine clippings and latex, and tailor-made for each member's face.

I was also asked to create a guará-werewolf for the film “Guará", filmed in Goiânia in 2019 and directed by Luciano Evangelista and Fabrício Cordeiro. All of this involved masks. I made masks for As Longas Viagens's music video "Abyss", based on the people I remembered from São Lourenço, who wore masks to avoid anyone from the small town recognizing them as they went "full-on crazy".

I was and have been creating and thinking and researching about masks.

From the idea of making a film during quarantine about flies in the bathroom (as we were thinking about the death that surrounded us), Felipe Yurgel suggested we used the fly mask for the fly that talks to the main character.

I believe that this film was an attempt to think about loneliness and the need for any physical, dialogical, spiritual contact with anyone or any being. To think about how much we try to maintain bonds in this loneliness, about thoughts that need to be shared. About podcasts. About our smallness. About talking.

While thinking about conversations to compose the script, I asked my friends for WhatsApp audios, about conversations that we had already had, but I asked them to remind me. I think it was about everything in the desire to be close. To record the film, I listened to the audios on hidden earphones and simply repeated them, word for word, in the same intonation.

Some parts of the dialogue were added by me as I spoke about what came into my mind, especially regarding my master's in anthropology, which was just beginning at the time, and which made me dive into thoughts, thoughts that nowadays I am already questioning, but after all, it is important to think and change, and that I could not share in the way I would've rather shared them: at a bar, with my friends and classmates.

As a director, I wanted to keep this film light with a pinch of comedy so it could become as simple as possible. Fortunately, Lívia Pasqual accepted the challenge that came out of nowhere of filming this, only us three (I, herself, and Maurílio), a film that was created in the process. And we had fun with all the colors that she added, guiding us on set when we could not see each other, lighting everything, operating the camera, storyboarding alongside me, and believing in it.

And I felt very comfortable at it, including at acting for the first time in a film. Many times I have hated having my image photographed, recorded. To see me like that was an exercise. And I enjoyed it.

ANIMAL’S HEADS REFERENCES

Artist Júlia Malkova

https://www.instagram.com/jmalkova/

Artist Masha Bogoraz

https://www.instagram.com/bogoraz/

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Production of the papier mache big head and art direction for the  album cover "Conquista do Inútil" by As Longas Viagens

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Masks creation and production for the show Corpo | at Espaço Grupo musical As Tubas 

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Masks made for the album “Abismo”, by As Longas Viagens – Directed by Felipe Yurgel

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Some references for the soundtrack:

Arismar do Espírito Santo

Produced by Guilherme Cerón

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Aura Sound of Yves Montand, by Hermeto Pascoal

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Weval, Someday

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BANDA AS LONGAS VIAGENS

Abismo - full visual album

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A Conquista do Inútil - full album

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A Outra Cabeça (QUE ÓDIO!) - video

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Sede de Sangue - video

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Lá Embaixo é Uma Linha Reta - Band documentary

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REFERENCE FILMS AND SERIES

Otésanek, by Jan Svankmajer

Justification: This film marked me for its building of the relationship between the woman and the dry root that she believes to be her son, for "whom" she demands so much affection that she ends up giving it life. I really like the way the fantasy is inserted in a very raw way in this film. A human X nonhuman relationship can occur in several circumstances, and in this case, this relationship between the woman and the root is due to a psychological trauma lived by the main character. I like this fantastic bias in which deep relationships that do not seem to be possible end up occurring between beings, and the question is not what reality is, but rather the power of this relationship.

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The Midnight Gospel - Temporada 1 (2020) Série Audiovisual

Justification: In the animated series, the main character lives on a distant planet and uses a simulator of realities to meet several characters that are fantastic creatures living on other planets, to reflect on many themes regarding the human experience. The dialogues between the characters were created from a series of interviews in podcast format and uses the real voices of the interviewees.

To create the film, we sought to use some of our friends' thoughts about the topics that would be discussed between Tânia and the fly. We received whatsapp audios, which composed almost all the lines of the film. During editing, we discussed whether this device would be shown to the public, and if so, where and how. After some testing, we decided to use the original audios during the credits at the end, so that viewers could understand where the reflections came from, in the desire to enrich the experience of the film.

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Videodrome, by David Cronenberg

Justification: More than one work by director David Cronenberg served as a reference for writing and for the production design. These are works that permeate the directors' imagination. Films such as Videodrome, Existenz, and even The Fly have provided many of the pillars for reflection on "reality" and the limits of body and mind.

The first question our film poses, which is connected mainly to Videodrome, was the possibility that Tânia, by not being able to solve the CAPTCHA test, could actually be a robot and, by not being, at least began to question what made her see herself as a human being and the limits of what she thought reality was.

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Ghost: do outro lado da vida, de Jerry Zucker

Justification:The classic scene in which Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze make a ceramic vase while embraced in an explosion of feeling and sensuality was, from the beginning, a reference to the moment in which the fly helps Tania solve the CAPTCHA test. That, in addition to supernatural features, which are nothing more than a possible extrapolation to our perception or knowledge of reality. The crew referred to this scene as the "ghost scene".

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OTHER WORKS

Art Direction and production of Lobo Guará for the short film “Guará” 

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“Sesmaria” (Gabriela Richter Lamas, 2015, 22min)

Interview about “Sesmaria” – Kinoforum