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CANNES 2007 Directors’ Fortnight / PT

O Estado do mundo: Six ways of looking at the world

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The Cannes’ Directors' Fortnight was proud to present the international premiere of O Estado do mundo, a feature composed of six films by international directors, Olivier Père said this morning

The film was commissioned by the Portuguese foundation Calouste Gulbenkian, which is holding a range of cultural events as part of its 50th anniversary celebrations.

Luis Correia of Lx Filmes, executive producer of the project, came up with the idea that directors make a 15-minute film on the state of the world. The only limitations were budgetary. “When I received and watched each short what struck me was that they all dealt subjects very similar to each other: memory, history, identity. These give a sort of kaleidoscopic view of the world,” Correia said this morning after the screening.

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O Estado do mundo is striking in terms of its coherence and poetry. Thai helmer Apichapong Weerasethakul films the first and most luminous of the shorts about a burial ritual on a river where a family gathers to throw water on the ashes of the deceased.

While the other directors filmed in digital, Weerasethakul opted for Super 8 and its vibrant, grainy images, capturing the movement of water, the body language at the ceremony and faces of all ages and gender, an immanent spirituality that goes beyond the memory of the deceased.

Brazilian helmer Vincente Ferraz’s short deals with the fishermen in his village and their fight for the survival of their profession, as they see their bay transformed into a marine graveyard.

Indian director Ayisha Abraham paints a portrait of a Nepalese caretaker in exile. Through his eyes, the story tells the history of a country in crisis (Nepal) and the caretaker’s new life in a lively city.

Meanwhile, Pedro Costa films immigrants who have left the Cape Verde for Lisbon, where they are threatened with expulsion and their story turns into a veritable nightmare. The film is based on a story very close to the director.

Using a hand-held camera and long sequences, Wang Bing presents the horrifying period of torture in totalitarian China. Through a disused basement of a factory in the process of being torn down, Bing shows a world doomed to disappear and reveals the ghosts that haunt his country’s history.

In two still shots Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman captures the bay of Shanghai in its modern hysteria: giant buildings covered in screens and blinking images that represent the “state of the world linked to the profusion of sounds and images, where in the end, everything seems efficient,” she said. The idea for the film came from the same desire to film a cultural identity as if it were doomed to disappear, precisely, in a single image. But paradoxically, the themes of water and earth that circulate from one film to another highlight the essential, what the state of the world depends on.

With an over €300,000 budget, O Estado do mundo was produced entirely by Lx Filmes for the Gulbenkian Foundation and will be released in Portugal by Midas, in France by Pierre Grise Distribution, and in the UK.

Negotiations are currently underway on worldwide distribution rights.

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(Translated from French)

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