Sofia International Film Festival

Joao Nuno Pinto As in Antonio Lobo Antunes’ novel South Of Nowhere (Os Cus de Judas,
1979), a novel, telling the story about the war in Angola, but being
actually a story about Portugal, in the first feature film of the young
Portuguese director Joao Nuno Pinto the story is about immigrants, but
the subject is again Portugal. Joao Nuno Pinto was born in 1969 in
Mozambique and his family, being Portuguese, immigrated to Portugal as
refugees during another post-colonial war in Africa. Later he studied in
the New York Film Academy.

In his film America,
presented in the Internatinal Competition of the 15th SIFF, he uses the
topical subject of so called illegal immigration in South of Europe as a
prism for deeper reflections about South and North, East and West,
about the human relationships, globalization and civilization…

More
important then to make a film about immigration, my intention was to
make a film about Portugal. Placing the point of view of the story in
the immigrants and the illegal immigration, having this extreme
situation, is a way of having an external view that amplifies the social
problems and cultural behaviours the country has. Like when you make a
step aside to have a more clear view of your own situation. During the
last 50 years of the XX century, Portugal exported immigrants.

You can read the whole intreview on our festival's site www.siff.bg

9 March 2011