By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
From NYC to Sundance: Fellipe Gamarano Barbosa, 'La Muerte es Pequeña'
[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]
Fellipe Gamarano Barbosa does things the hard way. At least, that is sort of how it sounds while talking to him about his sexy, intense Sundance short La Muerte es Pequeña. For starters, the native Brazilian adapted his source material–a Sergio Sant’Anna short story–from Portuguese to Spanish, and then cast Latino actors for whom neither tongue was their first language.
“Basically, I had no real reason to do this in Spanish other than the fact that I wanted to set a very specific tone,” Gamarano Barbosa told The Reeler. “What drew me to the story was the tone it was trying to hit, which was a sort of melodrama. The actors are acting; they don’t hide the fact that they’re acting.”
At least the guy knows what he wants and how to get it, a trait that likely played no small role in his 17-minute, $300 student exercise earning one of 73 coveted spots in this year’s shorts program. The story addresses the strange and sudden coupling of a man and woman viewing the same vacant apartment. She is just out of a relationship with a younger man, he is a paranoid journalist who observes her devastation up close. “It’s like a dance between those two,” Gamarano Barbosa said, “very much like Last Tango in Paris with a warm, almost Almodovar kind of touch. That was totally where I was coming from.”
After shooting Muerte, Gamarano Barbosa won a James Bridges Fellowship at Columbia’s film school in recognition of his strong work with actors. The award provided him a chunk of money he used to shoot his thesis film in South America, but on his way out of New York, he decided on a whim to submit Muerte to Sundance. He said he had no intention of actually being admitted, and he shot in such a remote location outside Brazil that he did not receive the festival’s e-mailed acceptance note until he returned to Rio de Janeiro–the day before the line-ups were announced.
Having snuck in at the last minute, Gamarano Barbosa started planning. He printed a set of business cards (“I’ve never made them before in my life, so I think that’s already some kind of accomplishment.”) and prepared a feature treatment with Muerte’s co-writer Ken Kristensen, just in case. But amid all the other little things, Gamarano Barbosa is more or less determined to relish the experience. “This is the first festival I am attending with a film that I made,” he said. “I’m going to have a blast there. That’s all I can tell you.”
