Above: Fernanda Torres as Áurea in House
of Sand
Although the stunning Brazilian Indie, House of
Sand,
hasn’t even had its international debut at the 2006
Toronto International Film Festival, it’s already
garnering some world-class attention, thanks to its
lyrical story and stellar cast.
House of Sand is director Andrucha
Waddington’s
first feature-length fiction
film since his 2000 award-winning Me You Them
(Official Selection Cannes
Film Festival/Un Certain Regard and Toronto
International Film Festival;
and Winner, Best Film, Karlovy Vary Film Festival).
Filmed entirely in the magnificent Lençóis
Maranhenses region (an
environmental conservation area in the north Brazilian
State of Maranhão) it features Academy Award
Nominee Fernanda Montenegro (Central
Station) and
Fernanda Torres (Best Actress, Cannes Film Festival
1986 for Parle-moi d’Amour), two of the
most renowned actresses of Brazil and real-life
mother and daughter,
brought together for the first time in a film’s leading
roles. Throughout the
film (the story unfolds from 1910 to 1969) they share
the roles of the
main characters, Áurea and Maria.
The plot of the film centers on Áurea and Maria and
tells the story of three generations of women are
forced by destiny to live for years in the remote
sandy plains of the north of Maranhão.
But what makes House of Sand differ from
most other
films, is the casting of Montenegro and Torres. The
actresses came first before a script was even
written. In fact, all Waddington had to go on was an
idea.
The story was developed from a photograph of an
abandoned house buried in the dunes of the sandy
plains of northeastern
Brazil. It was Luiz Carlos Barreto, one of the film’s co-
producers, who
thought up the story and encouraged Waddington to
embrace
the project.
“The truth is, I never saw the photo. Luiz Carlos
Barreto told me the story behind the photograph and
invited me to
make a fictional film about a woman who lived in this
house and had to
fight against the sand her whole life. That same night
I dreamed about the
image. The next day we started discussing the
House of Sand,” recalls Waddington.
The next step was to invite Elena Soárez to develop
the story. During its conception, the screenwriter
had to invent the saga practically from scratch. It
took two years of work,
with regular meetings between Soárez, Waddington,
Barreto, his wife Lucy
and producer Leonardo Monteiro de Barros, until the
final version was
completed.
“All we had to go on was the photograph and the
confirmation of the
`Fernandas´ in the main roles. Thanks to the
participation of these two
actresses, we thought of telling a story that spanned
a century. It was a
script written for them,” explains Soárez.
“Elena Soárez brought a metaphysical plane to the
script,” says Montenegro. “She measured the story
of these two women by placing the theory of
relativity within the
problems in their lives. Something very pure and
qualified exists in the
writer’s vision, that not only makes a story but
contributes to a non-realist
structure, not humdrum, not simply the chronicle of a
story. This meta-language
in the script is what makes the House of Sand
a
saga. More than
just a drama of manners, it is an epic story
connected to this wheel, this
universe, which in the end describes the story of all
of us on planet Earth.”
Soárez had to overcome some obstacles in the
production of the script.
According to her, one of the difficulties was to
maintain the story
engaging, due to the narrative structure of the film.
“It is difficult to create a drama when one has a long
time span,” Soárez says. “When one
extends the period for too long, one looses the
tension. The ideal thing is
to have something fundamental happens in the story
every half an hour.
When you open it up to a century, all urgency
disappears. Besides this,
the film is divided into three phases. For each new
stage, a new story. I
kept asking myself whether, at each beginning, the
audience would be
willing to start over.”
It’s obvious that audiences will be willing to start
over for this film. The script of House of Sand
received the Sundance/NHK International
Filmmakers Award in 2002 and at the 2006 Sundance
Film Festival it won the Grand Jury Prize, as well as
the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize. It has opened
in its home country of Brazil, as well as across North
America, to rave reviews from audiences and critics
alike. Not bad for a genre-pushing film that was made
for only US$ 3.4m.
