Vai e vem

Vai e Vem is the development of a cinema course I taught at the São Joaquim village, in the state of Acre in 2010 through the Vídeo nas Aldeias [Video at the Villages] project. I spent one month living in the village, working with ten Hunikui and Yawanawá students to create together five short-length films. After this rich experience, I wanted to go back to make an auteur piece.

I chose to work with the triptych form, using three screens to build a new form of narrative. This narrative use of the three simultaneous screens brought in such complexity and opening that was especially stimulating for my montage work.

This piece has always been led by the pursuit for the experience of presence, always contemplating that the intuition of another life is possible. Not to seek realism, to transform the exterior into interior, the people, the things, the lights, transformed into states of sensibility. Realism was not my concern, for things are never what they are—things must be seen, the world is beautiful when it is seen. To make the presence behind the camera-eye felt, not my specific presence, but that of somebody there, with their expectations, weariness, boredom, fascinations, astonishment, etc. To work with instinct and pleasure. To seek an inner voice which is not interested in the exoticism, but in simplification, is pursuing what is simple, in search of time.

To be, to observe, to join the dance, the swing of reality, let oneself be crossed by the present, actively participating through the entrails of a camera. The objective is to be present, is the feeling of presence, to see a shared presence. The time of who is filming is the same of those who are being filmed, of those who look and those who are observed.

Louise Botkay​ in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (June 2017)