In 2021, Adilson Mendes and I spent around 12 hours talking to Mozambican filmmaker Ruy Guerra, one of the great names of Cinema Novo in the 1960s, author of classics such as “Os Cafajestes” (1962) and “Os Fuzis” (1963). The interview, which took place over a few meetings at his home next to the Tijuca Forest in Rio de Janeiro, focused especially on his formative years in Mozambique and Paris, before Ruy immigrated to Brazil, and was published in full in the book “Ruy Guerra – Cadernos de Cinema” that same year. We reproduce an excerpt of the conversation here. [Sergio Cohn]
When did you decide that, of all the interests you had in art, cinema would be your language?
I’ve always loved movies. And there was a moment when I started to write some chronicles about the movies I watched. A pseudo-criticism, very small. In Lourenço Marques there were two or three main cinemas, which were the best. Of these, the Scala was the grandest. It was in the center of town, frequented by high society. And, by chance, I wrote a review of a movie that I didn’t like and it was published in a weekly newspaper that existed in the city. It just so happened that the owner of that cinema, the Scala, had had a big argument with a friend of his about that same film and they had taken opposite positions. It was a very passionate discussion. The cinema owner read my review and I argued exactly the same point as him. He was so pleased that he went to see my father and said he wanted to meet me. Then he gave me a free pass so I wouldn’t have to pay to get into the cinema. He said: “Ruy, you’re a film critic, you have free entry for the whole year, for all the screenings”. And he gave me a little yellow card. I still remember that card today.
That delighted me: being able to get to the movies whenever I wanted, however I wanted. That thing: my father was a second-rank civil servant, I never had any clothes of my own, I was always sued by my brother. Our family was middle class, money was tight. It was only later that I realized how difficult life was for my father. One example of this is that in Mozambique there was something called “férias graciosas”, which meant that every employee was entitled to one month’s vacation a year, and also every six years, those who lived in the colonies were entitled to a sabbatical year, as long as they went to Portugal. To maintain a link with the mother country. And I only went once. I lived in Mozambique for 18 years and my father should have used this right two or three times, but he didn’t have the money to take advantage of it.
Even so, with all the financial difficulties, my father taught me something that has marked my life: that I should always look for the best. Not necessarily what people consider the best, but what I consider the best. My father would rather have just one German chrome shoe than several worse ones. He loved clothes and only bought the best. And he taught me: “Give up other things, but focus on what you want”. He taught me to aim high. I’m still like that today. I can give up many things, but not what I think is important to me. This requires discipline, because you can’t want other things. It involves sacrifices.
It’s the same with movies. I spent long periods, six or seven years, without filming. It’s not that I couldn’t film, but I wouldn’t do what I didn’t think was good. Is it good to go six years without filming? It’s horrible! But if I can’t do what I want, what I think is good, it’s better not to do anything. I lived in favors a lot. I’ve been very lucky in life, in many ways, but things haven’t fallen from the sky. I spent 20 years with nowhere to live, I lived in friends’ maids’ rooms. I had nothing. It’s one day sleeping here, another day sleeping there. Hanging from the handle of a broach. But it also gives you a lot of discipline to know what you want. It forces you to know what you want, because the temptations are so great. I’ve turned down things that many people wouldn’t and that, if I hadn’t been shaped in this way, I wouldn’t have been able to turn down. I turned down working in television, for example, because I saw that that wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life.
When did you start filming?
It was because of the friendship I had with four brothers. They were all called by nicknames, except for one, who was Chico. The others were Gordo, Penca, which is Mozambican slang for a big nose, and Gala Gala, which is a type of calango with red colors on its head. A little dragon that does no harm to anyone, which is very common in Mozambique. It climbs trees. I was friends with his younger brother, Penca. And their father was a guy who had a lot of money for the Mozambican level. He was passionate about bullfighting. In Mozambique, they set up an arena and once a year there were bullfights, with Portuguese matadors. And he had a little 8mm camera just to film these races.
Penca then started stealing his father’s camera and called my group to film. I directed the movies. Then we filmed at Cais Gorjão, which is a huge port in Lourenço Marques. The first port on the entire east coast, where Mozambique was surrounded by English-speaking countries. And it was all about exporting gold and other minerals. There are two main ports in Mozambique, one in Lourenço Marques, which is this big port, and another in Beira. Mozambique is a long country, cut up by transversal railway lines. There was no railway line from north to south, it was only to serve the interests of exporting local products. That was all Mozambique was good for at the time. At the time, Lourenço Marques was the second largest port in Africa. It was second only to Alexandria.
My first idea was to film the port. Because it’s a very beautiful bay and then there was the port itself, which is incredible. I shot scenes at midday, of the workers crawling under the wagons to sleep in the shade. It looked like a concentration camp, they were very strong images. It took me almost two years to make this movie, because I had to sneak the camera in. The gang got together to help buy the 8mm films. Film at that time was reversible. To make it cheaper, the negative itself went through a process of 12 or 14 operations to become a positive. I learned to develop at home.
I learned this because I used to send the films to South Africa to be developed, but there came a time when they didn’t come back because they were detained as subversive. There were already some African independence movements and the government considered that those scenes were damaging the image of the colony. So I had no choice but to buy the equipment and start developing at home. An older friend of mine, Ricardo Rangel, was a photographer’s assistant and helped me assemble the glass and then wooden drums. It was the physical part that was tricky, doing it at night, passing all the film around in a dark room. They were small films, two or three minutes long, but handling that stuff was a lot of work. Of course, at first it stained, the washing wasn’t good. But we improved our technique and ended up making a half-baked version of the film, which was shown once, at home, and then lost.
Is the Brazilian sea very different from the sea in Mozambique?
The sea? Yes, it’s different. First of all, the sea in Mozambique is full of sharks. You can only bathe in an enclosure. The waters are very warm and there are lots of sharks. There’s even an enclosure in Lourenço Marques, at a time when the net was very old, a shark got inside and no one could bathe there anymore. It was a relatively large enclosure with a diving board in the middle. The tide is completely different there too, because it’s very low, so those pools of water form and you can go swimming. But when it’s high tide, it’s a wild sea. Especially there, which is Cabo Bojador, the one that is represented as a pile of rocks blowing. It’s called the Cape of Storms. And it’s curious that it’s a very green sea in Mozambique. There are places where the water goes blue. But there it’s always an emerald green, very beautiful. And there’s a fantastic profusion of animals and shells. I’ve always been very attracted to shells.
Did you have contact with the local black culture?
The culture was very divided. On the one hand, the Portuguese whites, on the other, the native blacks. We didn’t have much contact with black culture, except through our nannies. I had a black nanny, Rosa, who recently passed away. She worked in my sister’s house all her life, she always stayed in the family. And that made a big impression on me, even politically. That’s when I started to become aware of racial issues, for example. Of all prejudice. How could I accept racial discrimination if I had a black mother who bathed me and taught me how to speak? One day, when I was still a teenager, I wrote a short story, “Negra Rosa”, in which I portrayed her with great affection. It caused a scandal in the city. Can you imagine considering a black woman as your mother in a racial society? It was because of this racial issue that I began to become more politically aware, to understand the dictatorship that existed in Mozambique at the time. This was very important in my formation. At the age of 15, 16 I was already known as a subversive, because it was a small society and there was a lot of repression of all our actions.
I lived with black people until I was four or five years old, and always with nannies and servants, in the daily life of the house. Then, when we started going to school, there was no more living together. It was an entirely separate world. Except for those who, like my father, had a country house. I retained a strong bond with the farm workers, the gardeners, the caretakers. As I spent long vacations in this country house, I had contact with the people there, who didn’t speak Portuguese. We had to find a way to understand each other. I had a local friend who taught me a lot of practical things, like how to make a haystack, how to help pull a donkey. All those things that children like about life in the countryside. We could only communicate by mime, but I loved him. Everything he did I went with him, so it was very enriching for me. It was enriching for any child, it was a very rich experience, this everyday thing, which is living another life that in a way you’re not prepared for by school or by urban experience.
Black culture only really began to emerge after independence, because everything was so segregated. You weren’t allowed to go to the black neighborhoods, there were police everywhere. And even then, contact was very difficult, because Mozambique has thirty-six different languages. Some communicate with each other, but others don’t. The African countries were divided along rulers, without any logical border centrality. A straight line, mixing different peoples, separating peoples in half. There is no unified culture or language.
When did you decide to become a film director?
Look, it’s funny, because when I got to the last year of high school, which is the preparatory period for university, there was a graduation party. The students all left the country, because Mozambique didn’t have a university. A small number went to South Africa and the majority to Portugal. At the graduation ball, there was a tradition of the graduates wearing a ribbon with the colors of the profession they were going to follow. Each profession had a color: lawyer, doctor. And I, who didn’t have any profession, I just wanted to be a writer or a filmmaker, which didn’t even have their own colors, decided that I would make a ribbon with my own colors. I chose red and black, because it was communism and anarchism combined. And then, when people asked, I said I was going to be a filmmaker.
That’s how I really started making movies. Today I think it was a process of not feeling like an outcast, of not feeling unprotected, stateless. Not feeling abandoned. I invented that I would study film, which at the time was very difficult. There were only two main schools: the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome and IDHEC, the Institut des Hautes Études in Paris. There was also the Lodz school in Poland, where Roman Polanski and other great directors like Ivan Passer trained.
I only had these three options for studying. Then there were sporadic courses. But there were only these three film schools. I immediately ruled out Poland because I would have had to learn Polish, it wasn’t very easy. And it was a six-year course, with two years of internal preparation. I wanted, as every kid does, to get to work straight away. You want to create from day one. So spending two years learning abstract things before starting to shoot didn’t interest me. The Centro Sperimentale was my most natural vocation. We’re talking about the turn of the 1950s, so anyone who studied there ended up learning Italian realism. But there was a problem: foreigners could only be listeners, they couldn’t be regular students.
Since at IDHEC I could be a regular student, as long as I paid, it ended up being my choice. For the French, it was a state-funded course. But it was very difficult to get in, you had to do a year of preparatory studies. If there were 50 or 60 applicants, only 10 or 12 were approved. In my class, only eight were approved. But once you got in, everyone was treated the same. Now, if you could pay in full, you got in without taking an exam. That was my case. IDHEC was radically expensive. For me, then, who had the money to do the course, I had to be disciplined.
I was only able to do IDHEC because my wife had died in a plane crash. My father fought hard and obtained a large sum from the insurance company, which was divided between the three children. For me, that amount paid for two or three years of study in Paris. As I had never managed anything, I asked my father to send me a sum of money every month, but he refused. I was so scared, because when I did the calculations, I saw that it was a fair amount for that period of time. So what did I do? Every month I took out the amount I was entitled to for that period, and if I spent it earlier, I’d have no money left until the next month. I even went hungry in Paris because I didn’t get the money from the bank before the right date.