“The characters in Ariel are beings trapped in an intermediate space where time doesn’t progress linearly, a limbo between wakefulness and sleep, between the living and the dead, which allowed me to reflect on freedom, free will, and how we coexist with the awareness of acting out a destiny that perhaps we did not choose.”
Ariel seems to continue your exploration of the dreamlike and spectral in cinema. How did the idea for this film come about?
Well, the project started many years ago when Matías Piñeiro and I were invited to make a film together. Matías proposed working around The Tempest, because at that time he was still immersed in Shakespeare. This play seemed a natural point of convergence for us because it has the most presence of nature in Shakespeare’s work, not just as a simple backdrop but as an animistic nature, populated by spirits. There we found a common ground where our universes could dialogue: Matías through his exploration of theater and I through my work with landscape and the spectral. From there, we began to extract the elements that interested us to develop the film. We didn’t want a direct adaptation but rather a starting point from which to project our concerns and fantasies.
Was this before the short film Sycorax?
No, Sycorax also came about in the same way, which we made together as a first approach to a shared cinematic language. However, when the time came to develop the feature film, due to scheduling issues and deadlines resulting from the pandemic, Matías, who was working on another project in parallel, couldn’t continue. Since the film was already financed, instead of abandoning it, I decided to finish it myself, adapting it to my own concerns and capabilities, taking it more in my direction. One of the first decisions I made was to mark a certain distance from theatrical fiction and make the film even more meta-narrative than what we had worked on together. I was interested in exploring the idea of characters who are aware of being characters and how that creates existential crises for them. This is where a key concept from The Tempest and the character of Ariel, which we were focusing on, appears: freedom and free will. In Shakespeare’s play, Ariel is under the orders of Prospero, just as the characters are under the orders of the playwright who wrote their destinies. This led me to reflect on the nature of ghosts and the spectral, something I’ve explored in several films.
One of the themes that interests me the most is Limbo, understood as an atemporal, ambiguous space that doesn’t belong entirely to the dead nor the living, and that also has a strong connection with the dreamlike. It’s a state between wakefulness and sleep, a kind of drowsiness. In this sense, I found a parallel between ghosts and characters: both are beings trapped in an intermediate space, where time doesn’t progress linearly but instead repeats or becomes suspended. In Ariel, this interplay between reality and fiction is reinforced with the idea of characters who are aware they are characters but, at the same time, live in the world of the living. All of this led me to immerse the film in a dreamlike and spectral atmosphere, emphasizing that estrangement and the sense of timelessness I wanted to give to the island where the story takes place.
I think Ariel blends the sensory with the narrative very well. How would you describe your evolution toward fiction with this film, especially after your work in more experimental projects?
Well, in my evolution as a filmmaker, I feel that I have an increasing desire to immerse myself in fiction, in storytelling, in narrative. I come from a cinema closely tied to the image, practically from video art, where the focus was more on the conceptual, the exploration of cinematic language from a plastic and poetic perspective. I also had a strong sensitivity towards the contemplative, the slow… And the contemplative is, in a sense, the opposite of action. So, my first films were very stripped of traditional narrative elements: there was no plot, no psychology in the characters.
What were you interested in exploring at that time?
I was interested in exploring cinematic language from its most essential ingredients: space and time. In my early projects, I worked with distance as a narrative element; then, in others, I explored immobility in time. This is something that can be seen in Costa da Morte and the short films prior to that film. Later, in Samsara, I began to experiment with light and sound in an essential way. The central part of that film, where the spectator is invited to close their eyes, arose as an attempt to bring the cinematic experience to a zero point, proposing another way of experiencing cinema. But also in Samsara, I started to introduce small fictions, minimal stories that were heavily influenced by anthropological documentaries, building characters from real people and their biographies. With Ariel, this step toward a more defined narrative and greater character development comes largely from my collaboration with Matías Piñeiro. It’s a significant leap. If I had worked alone, this evolution would surely have been slower, but I’m glad to have had the opportunity to learn from someone I admire so much. Matías has worked a lot with narrative structures, and his cinema finds its most experimental character precisely in those narrative constructions. In my case, the experimental comes more from the sensory and the plastic. So, in a way, we complement each other.
Ariel is a first step in this exploration of fictional storytelling.
I wanted the film to flow well narratively and for the audience to be able to relate to Agus, the main character. She is the emotional anchor of the film: everything around her creates a sense of estrangement, but we need to connect with her through emotions. So yes, there is an intentionality on my part to add new layers to my cinema. I maintain the sensory experience, the dreamlike and spectral atmosphere, but now I also want to integrate fiction and the emotional and psychological experiences of the characters.
The characters in Ariel seem to be trapped in a sort of theatrical cycle, a kind of fate imposed by Shakespeare. How did you draw inspiration from the relationship between fate and freedom in Shakespeare’s texts, and how did you translate that to a contemporary setting like the Azores?
Shakespeare has many works where he addresses the audience, and The Tempest is one of them, where he directly engages with the audience, breaking the fourth wall and dismantling the illusion of fiction. This was always something that Matías and I found interesting when developing the project: finding a way to bring certain characters from Shakespeare to the contemporary Azores, but in a playful, fun manner, without solemnity. In fact, the first idea that emerged was that of a fruit vendor. Matías has long worked with the idea of not taking powerful male characters too seriously, as a way to dignify the female characters, who are usually secondary in Shakespeare. This is a constant in his cinema, in his five or six films with that philosophy. This also led us to Sycorax, the short film, where we were interested in rescuing a completely marginal character from The Tempest, a woman labeled as a witch. As we know, witch hunts were also a strategy for domination over women, something Silvia Federici analyzes well in her book Caliban and the Witch, relating it to colonization and the control of the foreign.
We also wanted to focus on Ariel, a character whose gender is ambiguous—sometimes played by men, other times by women—and who represents the spirit of the wind, the sea, nature itself. For me, Ariel encapsulates the concerns that Matías and I share: it is the being that metamorphoses, that exists between the tangible and the ethereal. From there, we began to develop parallels between the contemporary Azores and the play.
And what about the idea of fate and repetition?
It comes from this notion of the island as a limbo, a space where ghosts are trapped, unable to escape. That is the central idea of the film: the characters are condemned to repeat a play endlessly. But I wanted that reflection to go beyond fiction and touch upon our own existence. Who dictates our dreams, our desires? We know that the idea of freedom is complex, conditioned by multiple factors. Not only in the sense that Erich Fromm discusses in The Fear of Freedom, which is also present in the film, but in more concrete and cultural terms. Right now, I’m in Ivory Coast and I see that the freedoms of choice here and in Europe are very different. There is not just one notion of freedom, but many, and that is something I also wanted to explore in the film.
Visually, Ariel plays with vibrant colors and a very particular dreamlike style. How was the work with the director of photography, Ion de Sosa, to create this hypnotic atmosphere?
Well, in Sycorax we worked with Mauro Herce, so it would have been natural to collaborate with him again. But Mauro had other projects, and I think the nature of this film called for someone like Ion de Sosa. Not only for his visual style but also for his strange sense of humor, with a certain estrangement, something that can be clearly felt in his own films as a director. That sensitivity was perfect for this story. For me, this project was not just about dialoguing with Shakespeare but also with theater. I have always been more inspired by painting and tried to incorporate pictorial references into my cinema. But working with Matías and diving into Shakespeare, I wanted to open myself up to the theatrical universe. One of the first references that emerged was Six Characters in Search of an Author by Pirandello. And when we started to develop the dialogues, we were drawn to the theater of the absurd, that estrangement where Agustina asks something and the characters only respond with lines from Shakespeare that, although seemingly disconnected, make you search for meaning. This decontextualization of the texts is what ultimately connects the visual proposal with the dialogues. The dreamlike atmosphere and Agustina’s sense of confusion—her not quite knowing where she is—reinforce each other. And working with Ion was an absolute pleasure, a luxury for him to bring his visual subtlety and also help build that strange humor that permeates the film. I came from a more contemplative and spiritual cinema, and suddenly facing an existentialist and sensory kind of comedy was a fun challenge. Ion was the perfect companion for that exploration.
Many of your films explore the idea of transcendence and the immaterial. How does this search manifest in Ariel?
For me, everything starts from the space where the film takes place. The first part happens in Galicia, and at first, it’s not entirely clear what it’s about. There are many references to the idea of the actor, the character, the theatrical, the rupture between character and person. But it is not until we reach the ferry and this strange scene occurs—a collective dream where everyone falls asleep, even the captain, and dreams of a storm—that the film enters a territory that particularly interests me: that space of ambiguity, of dreamlike and spectral estrangement. It’s always the liminal places, between a tangible reality and a more ethereal one, that I find most stimulating. I believe that cinema itself, at its essence—images of light beings projected onto a white screen—has something spectral, immaterial. And Ariel leans into that quality to seek some form of transcendence. Toward the end of the film, there are several moments of voiceovers while we travel through the landscape, inspired by Marguerite Duras and her incorporeal characters who exist only through dialogue. In one of those passages, a character asks: Is this reality? And another responds: I don’t know what that word means anymore. But if we are characters, it means we are dead. I’ve always been interested in that game: the existence of the ghost and the existence of the character as two ways of inhabiting an immaterial world, trapped in a limbo from which they cannot escape.
And how about the idea of balancing the playful and comedic nature of some moments with the deeper, existential treatment of themes like freedom and fate?
Honestly, it was a conscious bet from the start, one I made with quite a bit of confidence. I knew we were going to play with that mix of registers. I think that, like in any other field—the arts, sports, whatever—to take a risk, you have to have a certain confidence, otherwise, you end up playing it safe. If you think of it like a tennis match: when you don’t have confidence, you hit the ball to the center of the court; but if you’re feeling good, you aim for the lines, and that’s where the beautiful points come from, the ones both the player and the spectator enjoy. In this case, it might be an absurd confidence, but I’ve always felt that the filmmaker has to take risks. And while this might be my least formally experimental film, it is so in terms of tone. I was interested in exploring very marked contrasts, like that humor that is not superficial but always holds a double meaning, in the constant tension between reality and fiction. And from there, it can shift almost seamlessly to the sensory, to the existential, even within the same scene.
Was all this already present from the first readings of the script?
Yes, for example, one of my favorite moments is a joke where the fourth wall is broken: the characters, who are trying to rebel against Shakespeare, ask if there is someone else writing what they have to do, and then that break happens. I like that type of humor that seems playful but, in the end, opens up a metanarrative, almost metaphysical, reflection on whether someone else is writing our desires, our dreams, our destiny. And from there came that attempt to make these two tones coexist: the absurd and the deep, the funny and the sensory.
After the premiere of Ariel in Rotterdam, what do you expect the audience’s reaction to be to such a peculiar and experimental work, especially considering that your film doesn’t follow the conventions of a traditional Shakespeare adaptation?
Well, on one hand, there are the expectations of those familiar with my previous work. I think this is a piece that will surprise them, although it may surprise less those who knew that it was originally going to be co-directed with Matías Piñeiro. Still, there are elements where someone who knows my work will recognize me, and I hope they will appreciate—or at least I see it this way—that it’s a work made with courage. It’s a film where I try new things, things that are different for me. Personally, it’s been a project that has helped me grow a lot as a filmmaker. When you venture into territories you haven’t explored before—like I did with this film—you encounter many challenges: from building characters, their psychology, the staging of fiction, to the narrative itself. There are many aspects that were new to me, and maybe I could have approached them more gradually. But here, there was this leap, also because of the prior work with Matías. So, on one hand, there are those expectations about how someone familiar with my previous work will react. And I think there are some ingredients that make it recognizable, especially in the construction of a dreamlike, at times spectral, sensory atmosphere, as well as in some recurring themes, such as the parallel between character and ghost. Then, for someone approaching the film as a Shakespeare adaptation, I think there are points where his presence can be perceived, especially because of the decontextualization, which is brought here with a very playful yet also deeply poetic and profound character.
How did you work on the selection of texts that the characters speak?
I used a technique of fragmentation, something similar to what I did in my previous short film The Sower of Stars, where I gathered quotes from different authors on certain themes, took isolated phrases, and mixed them to create open dialogues or small haikus. Additionally, I worked with an idea from Zen Buddhism called kōan: dialogues between master and disciple where there’s an apparent abyss of meaning between the question and the answer. There’s no obvious logic, but there must be one because it’s the answer the master gives to the disciple. I was very interested in this hidden logic. In the film, for example, Agustina asks something and the other character responds with a very poetic and profound line from Shakespeare. I chose my favorites from various of his works. And as viewers, we try to find logic in these responses. Even if the question is as simple as, “Do I want a ticket to leave the island?”, the answer could be, “On your face, there’s the trace of a tear to be extinguished.” I believe that Shakespeare holds a certain relevance, an irreducible quality, that remains even when taken out of context. No matter how playful the reading, there’s always something that stays: the poetry, the emotional depth, and the density of thought in each of his phrases. That would be, for me, the irreducible atom of his work. And what I tried to do was take those diamonds found in his writing and make them shine within the context of the Azores, in a proposal that bets on bewilderment, estrangement, and a certain distance from traditional narrative storytelling. I think, to summarize, what I did was explode Shakespeare’s narrative until only fragments remained here and there. But in those fragments, these diamonds—these phrases of extraordinary eloquence and depth—shine here and there.
