The film, shown in Toronto, San Sebastin and this week in competition at the official screening of the Cinelatino festival in Toulouse, tells the story of a family that survives in the interior of Brazil by producing charcoal.
One day, the family receives a tempting proposal: to hide an important Argentine criminal on the run (Csar Bordn).
Quickly, everyone discovers that coexistence is not as easy as they expected.
With a corrosive style reminiscent of the Cohen brothers, Markowicz presents a suspense film with unexpected twists, thanks to an ingenious script and excellent artistic coexistence between professional actors and residents of the city, close to São Paulo.
“I’m from the interior of Brazil, from Bragana (state of São Paulo). When I lived there, I always passed by the house of a very tough woman, and I thought about what could happen in that house. That’s when the idea came up”, explained the young filmmaker in an AFP interview.
The elaboration of the script lasted almost 10 years.
“Writing something is very difficult for me, very painful because it is very lonely”, admits Markowicz.
In 2018, the director won the ‘Queer Palm’ award for short films at the Cannes Film Festival for “The Orphan”, about an adopted boy who is returned to the orphanage because he has a feminine way.
– Distorted values -
Homosexuality reappears in “Carvo”, in an original and unexpected way.
“I’m gay and I grew up in the countryside, where being gay is more taboo than being a murderer, which is completely crazy,” he reveals.
“It was an important point to include in the film the absurdities, the totally distorted values in those communities”, he explains.
Writing an accurate script like “Carvo” can be an arduous task, but Carolina Markowicz agreed to change part of the text during filming, based on suggestions from the film’s protagonists, Maeve Jinkings and Argentine Cesar Bordn.
And he also modified the script based on situations that arose during filming and with non-professional actors.
“There is always great flexibility in Carolina’s view of what happens when people meet”, said Jinkings, who plays the wife of the charcoal burner, the most determined to move forward, regardless of the price to pay.
Carolina “is the screenwriter and is naturally rigorous with what she writes (…) but she gave us the freedom to improvise and also to collaborate”, added the actress.
The coexistence in “Carvo” is also linguistic, between Portuguese and Spanish.
“In the film we show people who do not live their own truth and, therefore, are all strangers within themselves, connecting and disconnecting at the same time. It was very important to have a person inside that house who was distant, but who managed to communicate in some way. way, and an Argentine is a person from outside but who communicates in a language that is understood in a certain way”, declared the director.