Director Biography – Bruno Miguel Resende
Born in Porto, Portugal, 1981. Actor, director, writer, performer. First work at the theaters with the play “Elogios da Embriaguez”, adapting Alfred Jarry, Charles Baudelaire, Mahmud Shabistari and Omar Khayyam, 2011. As a performer founded “Teatro Psicomórfico” with “a. m. e. n.” in a manifestation at Porto. With 6 books till now from poetry to theater and director of “Terapia do Bandido”, 2012, also performs in historical reenactments, snake enchanting, fire shows and faquirismo.
1. Hello Miguel, Coronantine projects the claustrophobic present situation. Everyone can
relate to this now. But, if the virus had not affected our lives, have you been ever
successful in depicting loneliness in such a manner?
In fact, i started making cinema with the laws made to control the virus. I felt the abyss of loneliness. Big events get forbidden and my artistic sector suffered, probably, the biggest impact, historical and popular events. In a time that most of them were not even announced. Measures taken never wanted Culture to continue. With all works canceled and with no help from state, having a continuous confinement but with the rules of “´normal life”, most of the artistic expressions i have get treated like being invisible. Performer of fire shows, street actor, snake enchanter, and many others, all erased from rescue. 0 Euros was the emergency fund i received. Propaganda made the effort of believing in a protection of art and artists. Quite the contrary. Money went to those who would define a selection. Political of course. All games made with the virus made me try Cinema with my phone. Coronantine was the second. I had no studio and no help from anyone, unless some friends. In Easter day it was the right time to film. I broke confinement in April 12th 2020 and i recorded the strange dead city. I made the film with my own instinct that found in that journey art and emotions. My Loneliness was the gathering of all. “We see the cities of the world get ghost-towns, with their streets in silence like village streets, where days, like Hugo said,” were like the nights.”, was written by Henri Lévy.
2. Is the real focus on loneliness or has there been a greater significance?
Loneliness is the most brutal image that confinement made me explore in Porto that day. But other feelings and experiences are inside the person who travels in that ghost city, making what i believe art is. Each person can have multiple ways of looking into the movie.
3. What is the particular reason for using blurry images?
I try to get the viewer close to that particular reality and voyage, the altered state of mind that makes that travel is defined for what I try to be a fourth dimension, blurry for the fear and the lack of cognition of inner self, the other, the environment. The prison of a free leach grabbed by an open hand.
4 Why is the movie based on only one track? Is it to give a sense of monotonousness.
It was also the warning of a cycle.
5. The wiper is disturbing the visual. Have you done it purposefully?
Yes. It also is eroding color and the city.
6. What is the significance of the sketch besides the boy?
“And the clown it’s me?” appears naturally in the last street, almost demolishing the “Brave Nation” that was the giant slogan of the isolation camp…
7. What has been the greatest influence behind your filmmaking career?
Gaspar Noé is the filmmaker that probably made me get into this journey. The experience of being sometimes inside his films, like “Enter the Void”, was quite different from a narrative process that our mind is always out of the creation. Feeling a fourth dimension with hypnotic soundtracks, a view from the eyes of those that deliver the body but also emotions made me wonder ways of get the view of my films as a self creative process, and also an experience rather than some minutes of entertainment. David Lynch and Alexandro Jodorowsky are some of the filmmakers that use cinema as a tool to their creations rather being used by Cinema. I try to follow this path.
8. What kinds of emotions is Coronantine going to trigger?
Mainly an unconsciousness voluntary journey to death. It was something that was taken from me. I never get the chance of seeing the movie in a big screen. I never get the chance of being a viewer, so that is a mystery to me. Even the curiosity is big, the notion that i am confined and the movie is a car traveling the world makes me fell that the movie get his own life and is free, what i am not. It makes my situation different. If i didn’t get my name appearing outside Portugal my life was far more difficult, erased, and i wouldn’t survive economical and social isolation. Coronantine and the Festival Bizarrya that i created made me be in contact with lots of great minds, and made me exist. All my claims of censorship were archived, some registrations diapered, works got stolen, police was often near my car, or calling me from the door of my home, what was later proved to happen with lots of persons. Coronantine made my name alive, and some friends sent e-mails to understand the meaning of “we are not interested in your implementation.”. That network that Covid can´t destroy is the most important way of comunication. (https://www.saasgenius.com/) Surveilance is everywhere, and making films that protect me is a great fusion of emotions that i see. As a viewer. As a filmmaker. As an artist that make what wasn´t not supposed to be done. Without electric power since December, cutted during confinement after contacting the 3 entities that are responsible for that situation and getting 3 of my snakes dead by that. Deads archived, of course, was scary enough to see how far Portugal was going. And Coronantine had costs in my life. With 25 selections, 5 nominations, 1 honorable mention and this victory, the emotions triggered are an intense mystery to me. One day maybe i get the possibility of view the film.
9. Every filmmaker has a target audience. Who is your target audience? What is your take on the recent audience psychology?
Audience diapered and started to appear with an induced fear of Art. Even music and Cultural events that made a bridge taking the Government approved plays and concerts achieving the most elegant and clean voyage into the past, where the feeling of liberty from the virus and all that surrounded him cleaned some dark emotions, in reality the audience was a gathering of ghosts getting real by the bridge that the continuous fake cultural repetition. Coronantine get 0 selections in Portugal. The press-release was not released. The registry of the confinement in Porto was an important and unique conquest that could be reminded as close to reality as possible through art, in the vision of the artist, and achieving always to understand psychological damages and social behaviors that were being mimetezed and induced letting a hug be the remembering of a transmission of human emotions in an Human that is despairing with time. Cycles were the obvious way of getting the equality of opposites. Fear is Bravery. Probably one of the most important Orwellian dystopian concepts.
Coronantine was made by intuition. Most of the film was in my subconscious. I get no answer from the movie, and soon I realized i was not getting answers from anyone.
2 months later a film with the same synopsis get all the attention that were surrounding the mysterious film of the confinement. Propaganda was the objective, and the tourist attractions the focus of the film where the confinement was in the air. Drone. The message of the film was clear. Hope. The problem of the film was the problem of most of the new way of choosing Culture by the Government. Propaganda and all that didn´t exposed the new human condition, the new superficial interactions, the fear of the Other, the blindness believe in a Dictatorship that is saving Humanity.
I realized that distance and confinement is a reality that i can´t erase, and that in Porto i am censored, making films with my phone getting the body of the viewer inside the film, and also the psychedelic journey takes that body with the full respect for the mind and body experience, to an intense moment in time that can show a new of breaking the distance, maybe, to be closer than the safe distance that is imposed.
10. The people seen in the film seems like a zombie for the blurry effect. Have you edited the scenes with the same sense?
Yes. But obviously stronger. Finding the Other is an irrelevant achievement. The Other that appears to be searching, is indeed merged in the city that is far away from the hypnotic effect of the lights that begin the movie in what the emptiness is an invisible delight to a sensorial perception. Also, it represents the place I live in, where modern dictatorship have tried to destroy my work in a physical way. The shadow that comes and goes achieves something by the victory structure of the body and the intensity that collides with a car confinement where a chain that a open hand holds preserves the apathy, the distance, the imposed ignorance of persons that get into the limbo of awareness.
