How do you develop the skills you learned at school?
Before I started learning the technical side of things at school, I had watched so many films, so in terms of language, the cinema language, I was familiar with it before I started doing things in high school. We had courses where we would just watch films and analyse films and these kind of things but really I had already done a fair bit of that myself.
Do you go on to college or university to study film-making?
I went to Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina, to study filmmaking. It was a program that was created by this amazing Hungarian filmmaker called Béla Tarr. He opened this program there and he was inviting different people from the cinema world, like filmmakers, actors, even philosophers, so his students could learn about cinema.
The experience was completely different from the experience in high school because there I was learning more about the technique and about software. I was learning how to work with lights and these kinds of things. In Sarajevo it was a completely different experience even from any traditional university. I watched films that were completely different from what people were usually accustomed to watching, the kind of films you watch in cinemas for example.
How was that experience different?
The process was more about finding moments in real life with real people. By observing reality, we would find moments that are really powerful. Dialogues, gestures, actions that would not be possible if you would have tried to direct actors. These moments are for me so precious to be filmed. I think I try to look for fragments of life that would otherwise not be documented.
I think being there, it was the biggest, most important time of my life as a filmmaker or as a person that is trying to make films. We were given a completely different vision of what cinema and films can be. At that we were taught that filmmaking is not only this money making machine that is being run all the time by major companies. Cinema can also be done in your backyard with a small camera, with a few people and with almost no money.
Now I am not saying that we can, or should ,make films without money. We, as filmmakers, we need to be able to live, we need to be able to make a living, and we need to be able to have enough finances to pay our bills. But films can be made without a huge budget and that was a very important thing to learn.
It allowed us to think about filmmaking in a particular way and it meant that I could think about making my own films, that I could develop my own approach to filmmaking.
If you would like to see more of Dioga Pereira’s work go to the links below
