In his new film Death Of A City (screening in DocLisboa’s Portuguese competition), João Rosas looks at Lisbon from an unlikely new perspective – that of construction workers destroying old buildings to make way for luxury apartments.
The idea for the project first occurred to Rosas more than a decade ago, in 2009, after he returned to Portugal from London. He had been in the UK studying at the London Film School and had made his earlier work, Birth Of A City, about the transformation of East London. Now, he wanted to focus on Lisbon.
“When I came back [to Portugal], I had been wanting to film my city, but I couldn’t really find a point of view or formal approach,” the director remembers. He knew he wanted to chronicle the fast-changing city before he “couldn’t recognise it any more” but wasn’t sure where to start.
By chance, he was invited to make a short corporate film on a construction site. The approach came from Nicholas, a French businessman working for an international property fund. Nicolas had bought three derelict properties belonging to an old printing company. Now, he wanted Rosas (whose work he admired) to chronicle the work being done on the buildings.
“When I was invited to do this film on the construction site, I saw it as a microcosm of what was happening to the city,” the director says. “I would make this film for him [Nicolas] but also I had full access to the construction site. I could film whatever I wanted and talk with whoever I wanted.”
The “gentrification” doesn’t just take place overnight. Old buildings need to be demolished. Thousands of hours of “invisible” labour go into the creation of the new city. The director had the opportunity to witness this process.
There are paradoxes about the construction work. On the one hand, it is dirty, difficult and dangerous. The demolition, the director suggests, is “one of the most violent activities I have seen.”
“This first image of this guy by himself on the truck with mountains of rubble behind him, it really was the image of death itself!” The director, though, also talks of his “fascination” with “the poetry in the machines and gestures.”
Rosas faced practical challenges – how should he film the workers and how should he speak to them? “How can you enter a construction site and not be looked at as the spy – the eye of the boss?” he asks.
The workers were often moved suddenly from one building site to another. That made it difficult for the director to build up long term relationships with them. “I had lunch with them. I talked with them and then, when I was about ready to start shooting, they left,” he remembers of their peripatetic working lives.
Inevitably, though, as he built relationships with some of his subjects, the way he filmed them changed. They came to trust him. It helped, too, that they weren’t just knocking down old buildings…they were putting up new ones. “As the construction work advanced, obviously the tasks were much less violent than at the beginning,” the director says.
Even the sound changed. No longer did he hear only constant hammering and crashing. It became easier to have conversations. At times, as different workers performed their separate tasks, the building site reminded him of a film acknowledges.
“Most of the people who were working on demolition were qualified workers before the financial crisis of 2008. That was also one of the reasons I wanted to film on the construction site,” Rosas notes. Early on, he had seen men with high levels of skills being forced to take labouring jobs and being exploited by their bosses. These people were “going through very hard times.”
There is an obvious political dimension to the documentary. Rosas is looking at how public buildings were sold to private investors who then turned them into private luxury flats rather than affordable housing for the benefit of Lisbon as a whole. However, this is a story with a happy ending of sorts. As the economic situation improved, so did the workers’ prospects. They were able to command bigger salaries and better jobs.
“Of course, there is an irony,” the director says of the upturn in their fortunes. “It’s not an ending because they are still doing it [the construction jobs].”
Outsiders tend to have a clichéd view of the lives of these workers. “We have this image of the construction worker as this guy who suffers, who is poor, who catches the train in the rain. [But] people are able to manage, live happy lives and have kids. It’s not only bringing walls down.”
Rosas credits the construction workers with introducing him to a side of Lisbon that he had never known before. They were resilient, knew how to enjoy themselves and never accepted the role of victim.
Death Of A City was produced through Terratreme Films, the director-driven, Lisbon-based production outfit set up in 2008 and which works with many of the best young Portuguese directors. “They’re my friends, basically,” Rosas says of the filmmakers at Terratreme, most of whom he has known since his student days.
Rosas is now preparing his first fiction feature. Due to shoot next May, this has a working title od When I Grow Up. “Basically, I’ve done already three short, medium-length films, 35-40 minutes, with the same characters. I’ve done this trilogy with kids that I met when they were eleven and I’ve been shooting them for a long time. This feature is [about] them. It’s a fourth chapter…”
