Jorge Jácome
“Fiesta Forever”
2K, colour, 5.1 sound
Introduced by Garbiñe Ortega
Year: 2016
Nightlife is over, discos are ruins, a world is gone. Melancholy seems the only option. A tribute to four legendary abandoned nightclubs in Portugal presents a moving vision of the power of togetherness. Beyond walls, dance is a revolution that cannot be stopped. We just need to remember how we feel.
Fragmented conversations between Jorge Jácome and Garbiñe Ortega about FIESTA FOREVER during the summer of 2020
18/6/20 12:32 – Jorge Jácome: Do you know where the title comes from? It’s from the Lionel Richie song, “All Night Long (All Night).
18/6/20 12:32 - Garbiñe Ortega: I didn't know! Let me find it...
18/6/20 12:32 - JJ:
18/6/20 12:33 - GO: I wasn't aware of the lyrics! “come on and sing along…!” ;)
18/6/20 12:36 - JJ: hahaha…
18/6/20 12:36 – GO: This Fiesta Forever statement has acquired another kind of power and meaning these days... actually the whole film does…
18/6/20 12:39 - JJ: Yes! I just read this article! In Portugal they consider re-opening clubs with squares on the ground of 2.25 m2 to set the distance between people while they’re dancing!
18/6/20 12:41 - GO: That's crazy...
18/6/20 12:43 - JJ: It’s insane!
----------------------
20/6/20 12:38 - JJ: It’s funny that we are having these conversations like this. Do you know that FIESTA FOREVER started with an iPhone? I wrote in my notes one night: “Não te podes esquecer disto Jorge!!!!!!!” (You can’t forget about this Jorge!!!!!). I didn’t write anything else. After that I realized I wanted to make a film about this feeling…
20/6/20 12:41 - GO: What was that feeling...?
20/6/20 12:42 - JJ: It was about being on a dance floor full of people. A transcendent idea, like the ones we have when we dream, that only make sense when we are sleeping. But when we try to explain it, it’s always out of context and we can’t translate the feeling.
20/6/20 12:45 - GO: I read something today re: bodies dancing together that somehow speaks really beautifully about what I see in your film. Can I share it with you?
20/6/20 12:46 - JJ: Of course!
20/6/20 12:46 - GO: It's a piece called “La comunidad sudorosa” (“The sweaty community”), written by a Spanish dancer, Aimar Pérez.
20/6/20 12:51 - GO: I love this idea of a group of bodies in movement, bodies dancing just like one. Every time that a body dances, it's creating a bond with a community, and it activates it, it gives it visibility... It strongly reminded me of what I felt while watching your film... this need of being with-one-another, “being singular plural”, as Jean-Luc Nancy said...
20/6/20 12:53 - JJ: Exactly!! But I feel that in the film medium it’s really hard to translate that feeling of the idea of dancing. I hate video-dance, for instance!
20/6/20 12:54 - GO: I agree, the translation is always a bit frustrating. But by showing an empty and abandoned dance floor, you activate our body memories, without showing any bodies, which is pretty very powerful and evocative for the viewer.
20/6/20 12:55 - JJ: That’s where I understood that I couldn’t have the bodies in the space, but only the possibility of memories and so I started to think about dialogues that could evoke that feeling. But never while talking about dancing.
20/6/20 13:25 - GO: How did you work on "the conversations" of the people we hear? I think it works as a perfect contrast.
20/6/20 13:28 - JJ: The iPhone is here again... I started to write notes to keep random ideas (like the dance-floor app idea), conversations that I had via WhatsApp, but also videos on YouTube on “how to flirt” or archive videos from Studio 54. I also created this method that every time I would go out at night I would write notes. And I would include the most mundane things, I didn’t want amazing stories or deep reflections…
Also, there is an important thing. Club culture is very specific and important to a lot of communities. It has always been. But I feel that I’m not part of it (there’s a lot of people and texts that could talk much better about this than I could). So I didn’t want to make a film about that. I wanted the film to create the possibility of making you think about this kind of night life and these concepts.
There is a scene of a film that I’m obsessed with. Have you seen A.I., Artificial Intelligence, from Spielberg? Do you remember the ending of the film?
20/6/20 13:42 - GO: I have seen it but I don't remember it. I have such a bad memory…
20/6/20 13:50 - JJ: In the last scene (and I hope this doesn’t come as a spoiler) the main character, who is a robot, stays for a thousand years (maybe more?) in the ocean inside a capsule. After that, some aliens or advanced robots (we don’t know) discover the body of this robot kid. They use the hair of his step-mother to produce images of how it was when humans were still alive. I always cry in this scene. Suddenly, he can see his mother for the last time and the robots/aliens can understand and have access to the world in a different time.
I like this feeling of being in the perspective of someone who wants to discover something for the first time. And if it’s no longer there, even better. That’s why I always have the need to invent something that doesn’t exist. So I can discover something for the first time. It’s true that the ruins of these night clubs still exist. But since the image has this digital look (that sometimes looks super real, sometimes is only pieces of digital crap), it gives the feeling of this scene from A.I., of a resurrected space. I can send you the YouTube video.
20/6/20 14:02 - GO: Please, send it to me. I will watch it later. I have to be with Iune now :) can I write you more later?
20/6/20 15:19 - JJ: Of course <3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_Xq0zHRc7Q
----------------------
1/7/20 17:47 JJ: Hello* Sorry! Just got out of my meeting.
1/7/20 18:19 - GO: How was it?
1/7/20 18:19 - JJ: Good! I’m preparing a feature film :)
1/7/20 18:19 - GO: Amazing! What is that about?
1/7/20 18:21 - JJ: It’s a “proper fiction” related to lightness and weight. Let’s see! It’s hard for me to write scripts… and working with actors and representations of lives. But I like to push it. There is already a first version of the script.
1/7/20 18:23 - GO: I was thinking about the shared elements in your films and came up with a few. Can I run them by you and see what you think?
1/7/20 18:24 - JJ: Of course! It’s always the best part. :)
1/7/20 18:26 - GO: Fiction / documentary. I find it very interesting the way you approach the real, using some documentary codes but presenting something that does not look realistic at all.
1/7/20 18:33 - JJ: I never feel very comfortable when I’m doing “proper fiction” (as I like to call it... with actors, scripts, imitation of life) but I also don’t have a documentary background. So I guess I just use what I know, to be closer to “the real”. So in the end it’s always about the possibilities of a new real.
1/7/20 18:35 - GO: I love that: possibilities of a new real.
1/7/20 18:35 - JJ: I like to work with the possibility of making/inventing archives and turning them into fictions. I normally have a fictional proposal that I believe is real. Then I think how I would make a film about that. New possibilities for new worlds.
1/7/20 18:36 - GO: That's exactly what we need right now...
1/7/20 18:36 - JJ: Yes, I agree. But it’s very hard to make someone believe in new things. Not only in cinema, also in politics or in new ways of living. Maybe that’s why my apocalyptic side is always there.
1/7/20 18:37 - GO: I think cinema is a great “tool” to make someone believe that something is real, possible or new.
1/7/20 18:38 - JJ: Yes! Definitely.
1/7/20 18:39 - GO: I was just remembering our Q&A at the Cinematek in Brussels where we had to state more than 4 times that what we see in your next film, FLORES, is not necessarily a documentary. Remember?
1/7/20 18:39 - JJ: Yes, hahaha. People don’t want to believe it.
1/7/20 18:39 - GO: it was incredible, it made me think of how powerful the moving image is, also certain kind of conventions of that language.
1/7/20 18:40 - JJ: More than once the spectators suggested to me that I should lie. But for me it doesn’t make any sense to lie about that. I’m not that type of a filmmaker. Yesterday I was watching “True Lies” from James Cameron on TV. (True Lies is an amazing name, haha).
1/7/20 18:42 - GO: It is! I found in your films another dichotomy or elements that create a very interesting friction: beauty and destruction. It's something we see in FIESTA FOREVER, also very clearly in FLORES...
1/7/20 18:49 - JJ: Maybe I can answer that with another film. The first time that I showed my last film PAST PERFECT was in a cinema school, to some students (it was before finishing the post production) and I was showing the process. Filmmaker Ana Vaz was there too. After the screening, I was talking about the apocalyptic perspective of the film, and she told me something super interesting. That I am always talking about apocalypse from a human perspective. She was completely right. I guess I’m always talking about human condition, after all, and beauty and destruction is my main vision of that.
1/7/20 18:50 - GO: And that human vision is always shown from a very intimate dimension.
1/7/20 18:51 - JJ: Yes! And emotional.
1/7/20 18:52 - GO: There’s something striking and delicate at the same time in FIESTA FOREVER: while we are navigating through those post-apocalyptic spaces, we are hearing very personal conversations...
1/7/20 18:52 - JJ: Yes, intimate conversations from different times and spaces…
1/7/20 18:54 - GO: That's another common element I see, the way you overlap different times in one space…
1/7/20 18:56 - JJ: I’m taking advantage of the best thing that cinema created: to work with time. And “time” here comes in different shapes and possibilities. (I think if we search in this chat the most used word would be: “possibilities”).
1/7/20 19:01 - GO: It means that there is this force moving your films forward trying to create new forms for the films to be made, not only creatively but also I guess in terms of producing them.
1/7/20 19:02 - JJ: Yes! For me, thinking about the production of a film is always a bit conflicting. I like to think of projects that are complicated to produce, but then I also want to keep the shooting and the editing very intimate.
I feel that I’m always between James Cameron and Nathaniel Dorsky hahaha... I can be the son of this homosexual relationship... But in the end, I feel much more comfortable in the experimental environment because it’s much more open to new possibilities.
ARBORETUM CYCLE, Nathaniel Dorsky
AVATAR 2, James Cameron
1/7/20 19:08 - GO: The pop culture is somehow subtly always present in your films. Specially music, maybe? Rihanna, David Bowie, Lionel Richie…
1/7/20 19:09 - JJ: Not only pop music! I watch a lot of reality tv, for example. Do you know a more interesting way to talk about the problematics of the real than reality tv? It’s so complex! Maybe that’s what we’re doing here...
1/7/20 19:10 - GO: … that we are pretending that this conversation is very casual and actually everything is more planned than it seems...
1/7/20 19:13 - JJ: In the end, fiction is always more intriguing than the real!
1/7/20 19:18 - GO: Haha, it is true. That's the reason why I proposed this methodology ;). All of it comes from "real life" but it will be a hybrid construction. That's exactly what I meant by saying that "this" can be a translation of what you do in your films into a conversation… if this makes sense…
1/7/20 19:21 - JJ: It does! I also love the possibility (again!) that films, for example, can be made on WhatsApp
1/7/20 19:22 - GO: and on Notes in your iPhone...
1/7/20 19:22 - JJ: Exactly.
1/7/20 19:22 - GO: Do you keep those notes? Like a list of ideas?
1/7/20 19:23 - JJ: I still have them!
1/7/20 19:24 - GO: I would love to see some of FIESTA FOREVER, a screenshot, if you feel like sharing it ;)
1/7/20 19:25 - JJ: <Multimedia>
1/7/20 19:30 - JJ: Random ones that I found with the date of production of the film. Not interesting at all :)
1/7/20 19:35 - GO: Yes, they are! That’s the way our brain functions, connecting unexpected things…
Credits
Directed / Written by: Jorge Jácome
Cast: Daniel Pizamiglio, David Cabecinha, Deborah Kristal, Ewan Golder, Joana Varajão, Jorge Jácome, Marta Félix, Shirley Bruno, Xenon Cruz
Editing: Jorge Jácome
Image: Marta Simões
3D Animation: Thibaut Rostagnat
Sound Editing: Luc Aureille
Sound Mix: Simon Apostolou
Sound Mix Assistant: Martin Delzescaux
Music: Luis Giestas
Production: Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains
Jorge Jácome
“Fiesta Forever”
Introduced by Garbiñe Ortega
2K, colour, 5.1 sound
Year: 2016
Nightlife is over, discos are ruins, a world is gone. Melancholy seems the only option. A tribute to four legendary abandoned nightclubs in Portugal presents a moving vision of the power of togetherness. Beyond walls, dance is a revolution that cannot be stopped. We just need to remember how we feel.
Fragmented conversations between Jorge Jácome and Garbiñe Ortega about FIESTA FOREVER during the summer of 2020
18/6/20 12:32 – Jorge Jácome: Do you know where the title comes from? It’s from the Lionel Richie song, “All Night Long (All Night).
18/6/20 12:32 - Garbiñe Ortega: I didn't know! Let me find it...
18/6/20 12:32 - JJ:
18/6/20 12:33 - GO: I wasn't aware of the lyrics! “come on and sing along…!” ;)
18/6/20 12:36 - JJ: hahaha…
18/6/20 12:36 – GO: This Fiesta Forever statement has acquired another kind of power and meaning these days... actually the whole film does…
18/6/20 12:39 - JJ: Yes! I just read this article! In Portugal they consider re-opening clubs with squares on the ground of 2.25 m2 to set the distance between people while they’re dancing!
18/6/20 12:41 - GO: That's crazy...
18/6/20 12:43 - JJ: It’s insane!
----------------------
20/6/20 12:38 - JJ: It’s funny that we are having these conversations like this. Do you know that FIESTA FOREVER started with an iPhone? I wrote in my notes one night: “Não te podes esquecer disto Jorge!!!!!!!” (You can’t forget about this Jorge!!!!!). I didn’t write anything else. After that I realized I wanted to make a film about this feeling…
20/6/20 12:41 - GO: What was that feeling...?
20/6/20 12:42 - JJ: It was about being on a dance floor full of people. A transcendent idea, like the ones we have when we dream, that only make sense when we are sleeping. But when we try to explain it, it’s always out of context and we can’t translate the feeling.
20/6/20 12:45 - GO: I read something today re: bodies dancing together that somehow speaks really beautifully about what I see in your film. Can I share it with you?
20/6/20 12:46 - JJ: Of course!
20/6/20 12:46 - GO: It's a piece called “La comunidad sudorosa” (“The sweaty community”), written by a Spanish dancer, Aimar Pérez.
20/6/20 12:51 - GO: I love this idea of a group of bodies in movement, bodies dancing just like one. Every time that a body dances, it's creating a bond with a community, and it activates it, it gives it visibility... It strongly reminded me of what I felt while watching your film... this need of being with-one-another, “being singular plural”, as Jean-Luc Nancy said...
20/6/20 12:53 - JJ: Exactly!! But I feel that in the film medium it’s really hard to translate that feeling of the idea of dancing. I hate video-dance, for instance!
20/6/20 12:54 - GO: I agree, the translation is always a bit frustrating. But by showing an empty and abandoned dance floor, you activate our body memories, without showing any bodies, which is pretty very powerful and evocative for the viewer.
20/6/20 12:55 - JJ: That’s where I understood that I couldn’t have the bodies in the space, but only the possibility of memories and so I started to think about dialogues that could evoke that feeling. But never while talking about dancing.
20/6/20 13:25 - GO: How did you work on "the conversations" of the people we hear? I think it works as a perfect contrast.
20/6/20 13:28 - JJ: The iPhone is here again... I started to write notes to keep random ideas (like the dance-floor app idea), conversations that I had via WhatsApp, but also videos on YouTube on “how to flirt” or archive videos from Studio 54. I also created this method that every time I would go out at night I would write notes. And I would include the most mundane things, I didn’t want amazing stories or deep reflections…
Also, there is an important thing. Club culture is very specific and important to a lot of communities. It has always been. But I feel that I’m not part of it (there’s a lot of people and texts that could talk much better about this than I could). So I didn’t want to make a film about that. I wanted the film to create the possibility of making you think about this kind of night life and these concepts.
There is a scene of a film that I’m obsessed with. Have you seen A.I., Artificial Intelligence, from Spielberg? Do you remember the ending of the film?
20/6/20 13:42 - GO: I have seen it but I don't remember it. I have such a bad memory…
20/6/20 13:50 - JJ: In the last scene (and I hope this doesn’t come as a spoiler) the main character, who is a robot, stays for a thousand years (maybe more?) in the ocean inside a capsule. After that, some aliens or advanced robots (we don’t know) discover the body of this robot kid. They use the hair of his step-mother to produce images of how it was when humans were still alive. I always cry in this scene. Suddenly, he can see his mother for the last time and the robots/aliens can understand and have access to the world in a different time.
I like this feeling of being in the perspective of someone who wants to discover something for the first time. And if it’s no longer there, even better. That’s why I always have the need to invent something that doesn’t exist. So I can discover something for the first time. It’s true that the ruins of these night clubs still exist. But since the image has this digital look (that sometimes looks super real, sometimes is only pieces of digital crap), it gives the feeling of this scene from A.I., of a resurrected space. I can send you the YouTube video.
20/6/20 14:02 - GO: Please, send it to me. I will watch it later. I have to be with Iune now :) can I write you more later?
20/6/20 15:19 - JJ: Of course <3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_Xq0zHRc7Q
----------------------
1/7/20 17:47 JJ: Hello* Sorry! Just got out of my meeting.
1/7/20 18:19 - GO: How was it?
1/7/20 18:19 - JJ: Good! I’m preparing a feature film :)
1/7/20 18:19 - GO: Amazing! What is that about?
1/7/20 18:21 - JJ: It’s a “proper fiction” related to lightness and weight. Let’s see! It’s hard for me to write scripts… and working with actors and representations of lives. But I like to push it. There is already a first version of the script.
1/7/20 18:23 - GO: I was thinking about the shared elements in your films and came up with a few. Can I run them by you and see what you think?
1/7/20 18:24 - JJ: Of course! It’s always the best part. :)
1/7/20 18:26 - GO: Fiction / documentary. I find it very interesting the way you approach the real, using some documentary codes but presenting something that does not look realistic at all.
1/7/20 18:33 - JJ: I never feel very comfortable when I’m doing “proper fiction” (as I like to call it... with actors, scripts, imitation of life) but I also don’t have a documentary background. So I guess I just use what I know, to be closer to “the real”. So in the end it’s always about the possibilities of a new real.
1/7/20 18:35 - GO: I love that: possibilities of a new real.
1/7/20 18:35 - JJ: I like to work with the possibility of making/inventing archives and turning them into fictions. I normally have a fictional proposal that I believe is real. Then I think how I would make a film about that. New possibilities for new worlds.
1/7/20 18:36 - GO: That's exactly what we need right now...
1/7/20 18:36 - JJ: Yes, I agree. But it’s very hard to make someone believe in new things. Not only in cinema, also in politics or in new ways of living. Maybe that’s why my apocalyptic side is always there.
1/7/20 18:37 - GO: I think cinema is a great “tool” to make someone believe that something is real, possible or new.
1/7/20 18:38 - JJ: Yes! Definitely.
1/7/20 18:39 - GO: I was just remembering our Q&A at the Cinematek in Brussels where we had to state more than 4 times that what we see in your next film, FLORES, is not necessarily a documentary. Remember?
1/7/20 18:39 - JJ: Yes, hahaha. People don’t want to believe it.
1/7/20 18:39 - GO: it was incredible, it made me think of how powerful the moving image is, also certain kind of conventions of that language.
1/7/20 18:40 - JJ: More than once the spectators suggested to me that I should lie. But for me it doesn’t make any sense to lie about that. I’m not that type of a filmmaker. Yesterday I was watching “True Lies” from James Cameron on TV. (True Lies is an amazing name, haha).
1/7/20 18:42 - GO: It is! I found in your films another dichotomy or elements that create a very interesting friction: beauty and destruction. It's something we see in FIESTA FOREVER, also very clearly in FLORES...
1/7/20 18:49 - JJ: Maybe I can answer that with another film. The first time that I showed my last film PAST PERFECT was in a cinema school, to some students (it was before finishing the post production) and I was showing the process. Filmmaker Ana Vaz was there too. After the screening, I was talking about the apocalyptic perspective of the film, and she told me something super interesting. That I am always talking about apocalypse from a human perspective. She was completely right. I guess I’m always talking about human condition, after all, and beauty and destruction is my main vision of that.
1/7/20 18:50 - GO: And that human vision is always shown from a very intimate dimension.
1/7/20 18:51 - JJ: Yes! And emotional.
1/7/20 18:52 - GO: There’s something striking and delicate at the same time in FIESTA FOREVER: while we are navigating through those post-apocalyptic spaces, we are hearing very personal conversations...
1/7/20 18:52 - JJ: Yes, intimate conversations from different times and spaces…
1/7/20 18:54 - GO: That's another common element I see, the way you overlap different times in one space…
1/7/20 18:56 - JJ: I’m taking advantage of the best thing that cinema created: to work with time. And “time” here comes in different shapes and possibilities. (I think if we search in this chat the most used word would be: “possibilities”).
1/7/20 19:01 - GO: It means that there is this force moving your films forward trying to create new forms for the films to be made, not only creatively but also I guess in terms of producing them.
1/7/20 19:02 - JJ: Yes! For me, thinking about the production of a film is always a bit conflicting. I like to think of projects that are complicated to produce, but then I also want to keep the shooting and the editing very intimate.
I feel that I’m always between James Cameron and Nathaniel Dorsky hahaha... I can be the son of this homosexual relationship... But in the end, I feel much more comfortable in the experimental environment because it’s much more open to new possibilities.
ARBORETUM CYCLE, Nathaniel Dorsky
AVATAR 2, James Cameron
1/7/20 19:08 - GO: The pop culture is somehow subtly always present in your films. Specially music, maybe? Rihanna, David Bowie, Lionel Richie…
1/7/20 19:09 - JJ: Not only pop music! I watch a lot of reality tv, for example. Do you know a more interesting way to talk about the problematics of the real than reality tv? It’s so complex! Maybe that’s what we’re doing here...
1/7/20 19:10 - GO: … that we are pretending that this conversation is very casual and actually everything is more planned than it seems...
1/7/20 19:13 - JJ: In the end, fiction is always more intriguing than the real!
1/7/20 19:18 - GO: Haha, it is true. That's the reason why I proposed this methodology ;). All of it comes from "real life" but it will be a hybrid construction. That's exactly what I meant by saying that "this" can be a translation of what you do in your films into a conversation… if this makes sense…
1/7/20 19:21 - JJ: It does! I also love the possibility (again!) that films, for example, can be made on WhatsApp
1/7/20 19:22 - GO: and on Notes in your iPhone...
1/7/20 19:22 - JJ: Exactly.
1/7/20 19:22 - GO: Do you keep those notes? Like a list of ideas?
1/7/20 19:23 - JJ: I still have them!
1/7/20 19:24 - GO: I would love to see some of FIESTA FOREVER, a screenshot, if you feel like sharing it ;)
1/7/20 19:25 - JJ: <Multimedia>
1/7/20 19:30 - JJ: Random ones that I found with the date of production of the film. Not interesting at all :)
1/7/20 19:35 - GO: Yes, they are! That’s the way our brain functions, connecting unexpected things…
Credits
Directed / Written by: Jorge Jácome
Cast: Daniel Pizamiglio, David Cabecinha, Deborah Kristal, Ewan Golder, Joana Varajão, Jorge Jácome, Marta Félix, Shirley Bruno, Xenon Cruz
Editing: Jorge Jácome
Image: Marta Simões
3D Animation: Thibaut Rostagnat
Sound Editing: Luc Aureille
Sound Mix: Simon Apostolou
Sound Mix Assistant: Martin Delzescaux
Music: Luis Giestas
Production: Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains