Romina Paula Introduces Her Film "Again Once Again"

"When people ask me how I managed to direct my mother and son, my answer is always: by being in it with them."
Notebook

Romina Paula's Again Once Again is receiving an exclusive global online premiere on MUBI, showing from July 29 – August 27, 2020 in MUBI's Debuts series.

Again Once Again

For a long time, even before I became a mother, I had this image in my mind of a young woman coming back to her mother's house, as a mother herself, with her child. As usual in my life, I write ideas that later on become true, and so I end up having an autobiographical work when in fact, it's life that insists on being literal and acting out what I had written. So, long before having a kid, two audiovisual ideas, as I liked to call them, followed me. One was this, of a middle-aged woman going back to the house in which she grew up, to live with her kid and her mom in the only place on earth where she can still be a daughter. The other haunting idea was to film and create a document of my mother in her house. Both of my parent’s families immigrated after World War I and although my mother was born in Argentina, she insisted on bringing us up in German. She met my father at the German club in Buenos Aires. Her parents met at the German bank in Buenos Aires, 30 years earlier. We all went to German schools in Argentina. Nevertheless, none of them ever even intended to go back to Europe, so it has just been a strange kind of melancholy or stubbornness, or perhaps a bit of both, that has sustained this German tradition in the family. When I became a mother, I decided not to go on with the German string, but I did want to capture the last German speaking link in my family, in her environment, one which I know well. 

As luck would have it, in 2017 Diego Dubcovsky approached me with an offer to adapt my last novel. His idea was to have me write, direct, and star in this adaptation. Since I didn’t want to adapt the novel, I came back to him with my two audiovisual ideas, and offered to keep his proposed structure—in which I would act, write and direct—but on another subject. Surprisingly, he accepted and hired me in the three roles. I am used to directing my own plays in the theatre, but I had never done the three things altogether. However, I had had a kid in the meantime, so it was much easier to play myself with my son instead of looking for a German-speaking actress and hire a child actor and all that this entails. Also, I was afraid my mother, who is no way an actress, at least not before this film, would not be able to be natural in front of a camera if it was not me she was talking to. So somehow I figured the best way to direct this particular movie was to also be in it. When people ask me how I managed to direct my mother and son, my answer is always: by being in it with them. And that brings me to the perspective point which is: I always ask myself how the first person works in cinema, because how does it work? In literature I have a much closer insight, but in cinema? What is the first person in a movie? Is it a voice over? Is it subjective type of camera work—Dardennes style—over somebody's shoulder? Being somebody's eyes? I still haven’t figured this out, but somehow, I would say I maybe understood that the only way I could approach this first person was through fragmentation, and so I used different formats (slides with voice over, slideshows as set dressings, monologues and close to non-fiction but nevertheless fictional scenes) to translate this fragmentation into cinema language, which I’m not fluent in. 

At one moment in my youth I saw a Jonas Mekas movie in a theatre here in Buenos Aires. There was a Mekas retrospective and I went through many of his films, until I ran into As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty. Without trying to sound too dramatic, I am pretty sure something in me changed forever after being with Mekas’ images and voice speaking over those images — his family, his rooms, the city. That was definitely is a candid use of the first person in cinema. And poetry! He writes with images; he observes everyday life and turns it into something essential, and beautiful. This brings me to Dorothea Lange’s idea that “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera." Cinema has such an empathic power, more than other languages, I think, and I don't know why I am mentioning this but probably it is related to the fact that the world is going crazy these days. I have the contradicting feeling that when doing a movie one should completely forget about humankind while being completely submerged in it at the same time, but on a more subconscious level, with humanity itself more than the social net of us on earth moving as ants, without any glimpse of beauty.

I like to think of this movie as a sort of essay on this, on how to portray one’s self, and the idea of the first person. As in the novels I write, I don't think my life is particularly interesting nor heroic but that is also the exact reason why I like to portray it, because the lives of most people on earth are neither spectacular nor heroic, so I like to talk about everyday life matters. I like sharing my look on things because I like to look at the world through the eyes or minds of others. 

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