Private Project

Paul

There's a film subtitler. There's a film she must urgently subtitle. There's the plot of that film, with which she relates on a level that will remain enigmatic to us. And in that film within the film there's a main character, whose dreams are being devoured, and other characters, interested in dreams as well, but somewhat more practical.
And there's music, and a promise of music.
Timelessly wandering through the world.

  • Marcelo Felix
    Director
    Eden's Ark (feature, 2011); Flower and Eclipse (short, 2013); Ein Stern (short, 2013); A Mare (short, 2014)
  • Isabel Machado
    Producer
  • Joana Ferreira
    Producer
  • Alice Medeiros
    Key Cast
  • Rómulo Ferreira
    Key Cast
  • Crista Alfaiate
    Key Cast
  • Mafalda Lencastre
    Key Cast
  • Dimitris Mostrous
    Key Cast
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Feature
  • Runtime:
    1 hour 11 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    March 1, 2016
  • Country of Origin:
    Portugal
  • Country of Filming:
    Portugal
  • Language:
    Estonian
  • Shooting Format:
    HD
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Indie Lisboa
    Lisbon
    Portugal
    April 27, 2016
    World Premiere
Director Biography - Marcelo Felix

MARCELO FELIX is a director, screenwriter and editor of feature films, documentaries and TV based in Lisbon. His first feature, EDEN`S ARK (2011) was selected for several international film festivals, among them the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Festival du Nouveau Cinema Montreal, Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival and Doclisboa International Film Festival. The film received the award for Best Film on Art at TEMPS D`IMAGES – Films on Art Portugal as well as the award for Best Film at the MOVE CINE ARTE Festival in Brazil.
His new film THE WORLD ALONE is currently in development.

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Director Statement

A paul, a factory, characters that connect both places and evoke diverse plans of existence, and the wish for it. These are elements of a film that, in turn, relate to other films and to someone who is subtitling them, widening the paths of various personal quests. Maybe the characters are all lacking space. Increasingly so, until changing something becomes imperious.

Paul is a personal experiment on expectations concerning film narrative, perception and conventions. I meant its structure to incorporate deconstruction at various levels (films within the film, fragments of fiction, a quasi-documentary sequence), while maintaining the possibility of narrative involvement. In order to achieve this proposal the film is helped by: an ambiguous interaction between the subtitler protagonist and the other (film within the film) characters, all participants of one same diegetic reality; the manipulation of some sequences during the subtitling process, which changes their perception by pausing, rewinding, forwarding, silencing, and captioning them; and the use of a little known language, spoken by non-natives absolutely unfamiliar with it.

The film is also intended to evoke the kind of threatened ecosystem from which it took its title: the paul (in Portuguese a wet area with both swamp and marsh characteristics) where the characters wander and in some way define themselves. It’s true that they won’t tell much. Characters sometimes remain silent or, as the subtitler, never utter a word. We took a glance at them and they’ll leave us (or so I hope) evoking their hypothetical stories and disparate dreams. A factory somewhere. Doubts looming above. And that paul that endures without them. Without us.