Paulo Branco, the Portuguese production maestro with some 85 previous credits, would prefer to keep quiet about this one. "You cannot describe Few of Us," he explains. "It's like trying to describe the films of Tarkovsky or Godard. These are cinematic poems, they are beyond words. It is best you write as little as possible about it." Briefly then, Sharunas Bartas' third feature affords an elegiac exploration into the world of incommunicability. There is no dialogue, only the blowing of the wind, the trickling of water and a few songs. The plot is negligible - a nameless girl, played by Katerina Golubeva (Koridorius, J'ai pas sommeil) arrives in a remote Siberian village, smokes a lot of cigarettes, and, er, that's it.
"This is true cinema," claims Branco. "It is not only about the story, it is about how you tell it. Bartas lets people communicate with their presence, with their eyes, by inhaling on a cigarette…they don't need words." As for the film's bleak, desolate and usually sub-zero setting, Branco points to the quote from Ribnikov's Junona et aves from which the film's title is taken: "There are few of us, hell, only a few of us, but the scariest thing is we're separate."
"That," says Branco, "is all you need to know." Branco's first ever meeting with Bartas, at last year's Berlin festival, was a similarly succinct affair. Having seen Bartas' Koridorius (Corridor), Branco was ready to produce anything the Lithuanian-born director was working on. "He showed me a script but he had only done seven pages," remembers Branco. "It was enough."
Branco, who also produced Raul Ruiz's entry at Cannes this year (Trois vies et une seule mort), funded the US$1.2 million Few of Us through his production companies in Lisbon (Madregoa Filmes) and Paris (Gemini Films), with US$250,000 from the French government's Le Fond Eco and over US$230,000 from Westdeutsche Rundfunk. Lithuanian production company Studio Kinema provided front-line assistance during the gruelling six-month shoot.
Now that the film's selection for Cannes has cemented their partnership, Branco is already producing Bartas' next feature, The House. Shooting begins in October, but Branco isn't talking about this one either. "It's another poem," he laughs. "Just put that it's about a house."
Adam Minns
Prod co: Madragoa Filmes, Gemini Films, WDR, Studio Kinema
Prod: Paulo Branco
Dir/Scr/Ph: Sharunas Bartas
Mus: Victor Copytsko
Ed: Mingaile Murmulaitiene
Cast: Katerina Golubeva, Sergei Tulayev, Minoru Hideshima
Running time: 105mins
International sales: Mercure Distribution (Netherlands/NFM)
