AQUAPARQUE

Director's Statement

“All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person.
What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a
stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it
happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.”
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others.

On July 27, 1993, there was a tragic accident, involving two 9-year-old’s in an aquatic amusement park in Lisbon.
Frederico Duarte and Cristina Caldas were sucked into the pool pipes and reported missing. However, two days
later, when they emptied the pool they found them dead, both inside the same suction tube.
I was 13 at the time and followed this event on TV. It had so much media attention that it still inhabits the memory
of this generation in Portugal. And since then, the made-up image inside my head of the two entwined children,
continues to return and to be part of my imaginary.
In many cases cinema touches on something that is real and turns it into fiction. It's a strategy to replicate the
world through artistic means and devices, to question, underline or denounce reality.
Initially there was the desire to write for that abandoned space more than 10 years ago. A space where I had
never entered, but where I could peek through the bars that surrounded it. Finally, in 2013, at a time when the
financial crisis was at its peak in Portugal, and rulers "encouraged" citizens to emigrate, especially young
graduates with no prospects of finding work, I wrote this script.
The script could be about a happy, innocent and teenage romance, and the film could be a small juvenile music
video. But it is based on three points: the distant memory of the 1993 accident, the financial crisis in Portugal,
and the ambiguity between good and evil, morality, tragedy and gender narratives.
1. Regarding the accident there is nothing more to say, the subject matter ends here. I do not dare, out of respect
and modesty, to go further in an attempt to underline or attempt a resolution. It's a memory, a crystallized image,
it was a starting point.
2. About the crisis, because I believe that it has triggered behaviors, or rather, deviations in behavior, in decisions,
in choices, especially in affections and relationships. As an outside force acting almost like a curse, it changes and
transforms people's fate. In this film, the fate of the characters.
3. About ambiguity. First, to blur the frontier of narratives that chooses or induces the public to choose sides,
especially the dichotomy of good and evil. The characters are not governed by these values, because in them
there is no conflict between right or wrong. From the importance of not moralizing this story, neither the
characters, nor the spectator's gaze, and even without being a combat or inversion of the gender roles, it was
crucial to write a female character that does not completely fit into the usual canons of his representation. She is
not a hero, not just a loving interest, she is not a caregiver (maternal), she is not romanticized, she is not servile,
she does not allow herself to give into feelings. She still has a mission, a goal that only she knows and a future to
fulfill. The male character finds himself in a situation that is beyond his control and from which there is no return.
This small fiction film reveals a brief moment, where the before and after belongs to the invisibility side. Starts
from the micro, something that could belong to everyday life, but tries to open itself to the world.