03/07/2023 - The Lisbon-born director’s documentary is a meditation on the use of archive footage and will have its European premiere at Karlovy Vary as part of EFP’s Future Frames

Based in San Francisco and born in Lisbon, Inês Pedrosa e Melo has an MA in Visual Anthropology from NOVA FCSH (2022) and is a graduate of Stanford University’s Documentary Film & Video Production MFA programme.

She took time out to talk to us about her latest short, Home, revised, awaiting its European premiere at Karlovy Vary as part of EFP’s Future Frames. It’s a documentary that delves into the use of archival imagery and how documentarians use it to make sense of both the past and the present. The work, which includes interviews with filmmakers, alongside the use of said archival footage, is an examination of Portugal’s past, and a reflection on the power of nostalgia and the mechanics of documentary filmmaking.

Cineuropa: How did you first become inspired to examine the ethics and mechanics behind the use and appropriation of archival footage?
Inês Pedrosa e Melo: It must have been when I first learned about the home-movie archive initiative that the Lisbon Municipal Video Archive had just started back in 2015. I eventually had the chance to do a three-month internship with them, and I was spending my afternoons watching all of these beautiful home movies, logging the footage, editing it… And I think that’s when I really became aware of the power and importance of these visual archives for history and for art, and I came to understand a dimension of my country that had pretty much been invisible up to then.

I had so many ethical issues and questions surrounding the whole idea of appropriating other people’s images bubbling up in my head. And eventually, I realised that I had to really explore what those questions were, and what rules guided other filmmakers who made this type of cinema… To create a manifesto, of sorts.

How did you approach selecting the archival footage for the film?
The archival footage used in the film had been given to me either through the Municipal Video Archive or through direct contact with the people who owned the material. I was working with the raw materials from five different families, and at the time [in 2016], it was their images that I, for one reason or another, really connected with the most. All of this footage was eventually stored on hard drives and went untouched for years, until I returned to it in 2020/2021.

In terms of the footage that actually made it into the film, as I started to create chapters and distil the knowledge I had gathered from the interviews with artists and filmmakers into different chapters or thoughts, I started going through these images, trying to find parallels between them and the topics we were discussing in the film. Some of them I always knew I had to use – like the images of the protests, the day after the Carnation Revolution, for their historical value. Others were more of an emotional connection, while others were kind of visual parallels and puns. Really, the editing process for the film — which was entirely made by me — was guided by emotion and feeling, rather than pure intellect, while still being led by my own sense of ethics in terms of what seemed appropriate to show or not to show. It was a really freeing creative exercise.

In the process, what things did you discover that surprised you?
I think more than anything else, I was really struck by some of the incredibly poetic ways that filmmakers connected with the images that they repurposed in their films. The idea of the archival image, the home movie, as a way to connect with someone through time and space, which was alluded to by multiple filmmakers, was quite appealing to me, because it was something that I had felt for a long time but had never known how to put into words.

More than being archaeologists, historians and artists who are working with these images, we are still fundamentally humans who are always trying to find meaning in our existences in stories, in symbols, in images, in little things that are presented to us. So a lot of this creative archival work has to do with this emotional process of connecting with history and with the humanity in the images.

Do you have any ideas for your next project?
The main film I am working on right now is a short currently titled The Dark Knot at the Center. It’s a road-movie documentary hybrid that tries to portray the reality of abortion travel in the USA through intimate vignettes.