18/08/2026 - The Swiss director of Portuguese origin discusses how he created his passionate blend of comedy, drama and music

(© Locarno Film Festival/Ti-Press)

Writer-director Basil Da Cunha has devoted his filmography to working within the neighbourhood of Reboleira, on the outskirts of Lisbon, where he once again sets his latest feature, O Jacaré, which screened in the main competition at the Locarno Film Festival. Once some stolen money enters the community, everyone’s scrambling to find it. While alliances form and break, comedy, drama and music mix in a passionate blend.

Cineuropa: There are several ways that the titular alligator can be interpreted, either through a symbolic lens or through a literal one. Can you talk about your perspective? Or did you prefer to leave it to the audience?
Basil Da Cunha: “O Jacaré” – the alligator – is a name we use in the neighbourhood for hustlers, for people who are always trying to outsmart someone else. It’s a very local expression. In that sense, this is really a film about hustlers: everyone is trying to be smarter than everyone else, trying to get their hands on the money that disappeared after the robbery.

There’s also something very literal about it. In these neighbourhoods, drug dealers sometimes like to keep exotic animals, so the idea of an alligator being there didn’t seem completely unbelievable to me. I’ve always had animals in my movies. I find something beautiful and poetic about seeing lizards, horses or other animals in an urban environment, as in my previous films. This time, I needed something bigger, so an alligator seemed like a good option.

Your free-flowing, barrier-free cinematographic style is attuned to the architecture and movement of Reboleira. Could you share a bit about how this approach came about?
I write for specific people and specific places. All of my films have been shot there, and together, they form a kind of ongoing portrait of the neighbourhood. Reboleira was built largely by immigrants who came to Portugal in the 1970s to construct the country’s bridges, roads and buildings. But they also built their own neighbourhood, with their own hands, through a system of mutual help and solidarity. Its architecture reflects a very particular idea of community and of living together.

The way a space is built inevitably affects the people who live there. In Reboleira, everything is very close and very dense. That creates intimacy and sometimes tension, but also poetry and mystery. It’s a strange place where, cinematically, almost anything feels possible. My way of filming stems directly from that.

Surveillance tools play an interesting role in the story, from policing to the drones that the kids fly around. The directing also reflects this: we are able to watch the drama play out from above. Which elements of surveillance, voyeurism and watchfulness were most important to you?
A neighbourhood like this is almost like a small village: everyone watches everyone else, and everyone knows everyone else’s business. At the same time, it is also a neighbourhood that is constantly being watched from the outside, particularly by the police.

There are different layers of surveillance. People watch each other from windows, from the street, through rumours; the police watch the neighbourhood; the kids watch everything with their drones. Once this missing money enters the story and destabilises the whole community, that creates an atmosphere of constant suspicion. Everyone is watching everyone else, wondering who knows what, who has seen what and who has the money.

You work with a tight ensemble cast, where there is no single hero. What is your story development process like? Do you start with a certain seed of an idea and see how it moves from there? Likewise, do you work with improv on set?
No, actually – it’s very much written and prepared. The central idea was to tell the story of this place through many different voices, rather than through a single hero. The real difficulty with an ensemble film is eliciting empathy for all of these characters, even when they are doing questionable things, and finding a kind of musicality between all of the storylines. You have to create a rhythm that keeps carrying the viewer from one character to another without losing them along the way. Whether we succeeded or not, I’ll let you be the judge!

You’ve previously said that you see O Jacaré as a sort of homage to Reboleira, given the increasing gentrification, with the return of different actors and characters from your past films. Were there any particular moments on set that really remained in your memory?
One important moment for me was the big party you see. In reality, those kinds of parties already belong to the past. The café where we shot it has since been demolished, and many of the people who used to live there have already left the neighbourhood. But for the film, we brought everyone back together and recreated one of those moments. Different generations, actors from my previous movies, people from the neighbourhood – the whole family together again. So, in a way, we weren’t only shooting a fictional scene; we were recreating something that was already disappearing. It became a real celebration of the neighbourhood and of all of the people who have been part of these films over the years. That moment stayed with me.