It’s quite possible that I began making a documentary film to understand my fascination with the genre. Going to the movies was forbidden among Seventh-day Adventists, the community in which I was born and raised. The lack of justification for the ban only sharpened my curiosity to discover, after all, what great magic that velvet-curtained room could produce in a film. The whole thing is so wild that it’s worth saying — I did know films; at home, we were allowed to watch them.

I was just about to disobey to find out when I was gifted my first trip to a movie theater. My mother took me to see Titanic, which premiered in Brazil the same month I turned ten. I remember finding it odd when she warned me that it would be cold inside the cinema (how could she know?).

My mother had told me the story of Titanic “really happened,” and that served as her justification for going to the movies; just as it had been justification enough for her mother to say that Terra Nostra “really happened” to her family — Italian immigrants in early 20th-century Brazil — even though watching soap operas was also forbidden.

Already in the opening scene, I whispered to my mom: “Wait, wasn’t this a real movie?” A “real” movie, to me, meant a documentary — so I wasn’t satisfied with my mother’s answer, already absorbed by the big screen, that yes, it was a real movie. Maybe it was the actors, betraying the mix of time periods, that made me insist: “But they filmed this just now, right?” I boarded Titanic wrapped in that confusion, only resolved at the end of the film (spoiler alert! ha ha) when Rose DeWitt Bukater, the real survivor of the Titanic, appears. That scene didn’t just settle my restlessness — it inaugurated, along with the soap opera my grandmother soon started watching, the idea that you could fictionalize real events so that people could truly feel them. And that became, for me, what a real movie is.

I hadn’t thought of this story in a long time — it resurfaced now, just as I sit down to write about making an ethnographic film. Maybe that’s it: my first experiences with cinema — as a viewer and now as someone who makes films — navigate a space between invented truths and documentary fictions.

Whether through the duties of a researcher or pure curiosity about the world, I became an ethnographer long before making an ethnographic film. You could even say it was out of incompetence — since seeking out encounters with otherness is the only way I know to follow the tangled thread that emerges after a question forms in my head. In other words, I made a film because I’m an ethnographer, not the other way around. That means that in few prior situations had I systematically used the image of the other as a research method for social questions. Thinking about visual records of experiences lived by me, by my interlocutors, by all of us — that always came after the writing process.
Ethnographic writing is part of creating the research itself. It’s much more than a factual report, an objective representation of reality observed from the outside. It’s a form of narrative with its own style, its own poetry, its creative elements. It’s possible that the more literary elements a text includes, the more accurate the documentation of the human experience becomes.

In previous artistic works, I had already thought of text as drawing and image, abstracting all its content — except this one fact: that writing draws. But I hadn’t yet thought, imagine that, that beyond the narrative content of speech, the characters in my film would have an image.

A huge oversight — one that could’ve cost me the entire film — because the image, even more than the text, has the superpower of constructing truth; it asserts itself and even overrides what is said.

When reading a text, the reader hasn’t seen exactly what the ethnographer saw — so that oversized brand logo on a t-shirt, for example, can enter the narrative only when it fits. That way, we avoid letting such details muddy or overwhelm other understandings. Separating ingredients before mixing them usually helps. Reality is too complex — that’s why we compartmentalize, in hopes of understanding it.

When the camera’s rolling, however, and the documentarian is focused on capturing moments that build a character’s charisma so the audience will want to follow them for 60 or 90 minutes, there’s no escaping the giant Nike logo and saving that detail for later — because it was only on that day that the person happened to pet a dog while contemplating the street, or bit their lips repeatedly out of nervous anticipation. In situations like those, editing is the final judge. In other moments of filming, though, it is possible to ask the character to change clothes, to say it again, to speak differently, to look the other way — even (or especially) in an ethnographic film.

What I find problematic in this kind of film is constructing scenes or even shots to prove a thesis built in advance. But I see it as a sign of respect and care to construct scenes that do justice to how the character wants to be seen. And, as no answer is ever simple — seen by whom? Ideally, the answer will be a co-creation between character and documentarian. A co-creation that involves translating worlds from one person to another. What greater truth could there be than telling the person who’ll be represented by me the path I’m considering for the film, how I imagine (even if provisionally) that the image we’re making now will be edited — and, moreover, how the audience I know might interpret them this way or that — and asking: is that how you want to be seen?

Maybe then, the image of the other would be a little less under the custody of the one who directs.
The real film I want to make documents the construction of truth that happens through encounter, and proposes shared custody of the images.