Ten Years of Filming: Time and Life in "The Prince of Nanawa"

Clarisa Navas 's previous film was prodigious. Las mil y una (2020) focused on a love story between two very young girls from a poor neighborhood in Corrientes, although the recording of the context was as decisive as the love story that sustained the story. The spatial concept of that film, which favored the sequence shot, was ostensible. Navas filmed with authority and determination. El príncipe de Nanawa confirms the maturity of the 35-year-old filmmaker from Corrientes, as well as her versatility, but such a description is somewhat imprecise. Not many filmmakers are capable of making cinema and life indistinguishable domains. That is what happens in this feature film, which can be seen in August at the Malba .

In Nanawa, a Paraguayan city bordering Clorinda, Navas met Ángel during a 2015 filming for a women's series on the Encuentro Channel. Although he's a commoner, his relationship with the world conveys an unusual confidence, perhaps rooted in his loquacity and the precocious clarity with which he can address a regional dilemma related to bilingualism. It's understandable that someone might describe him as a prince in passing.

There are indelible titles in the history of cinema, like Close-up and Santiago , moments in which a filmmaker's encounter with a character inscribes something in the history of cinema itself, something that happens only rarely. What happens here in front of the camera and over the course of ten years of filming is a conquest of cinema over that which defines it. It is time that can be perceived in this film; it touches on the span of a lifetime. That alone is cause for celebration.

But the film is something more. In the time shared and filmed, an affective institution is delineated that defies any classification. It is not a family, not a community, but rather a diffuse affective entity born by cinema; a loving bond is formed between the filmmaker and the protagonist, which includes Ángel's family and Navas's very few collaborators, a way of living with others that has no name. That is why Prince of Nanawa is a unique and unforgettable film; a mystery hovers over its nearly four-hour duration, the time for time to reveal itself in its incessant work on body and soul.

–In the preamble, the story introduces the moment of the encounter with Ángel, the awareness behind the scenes that this child is a truly unique person. You can also detect the first hint of affection between you and him.

–Something very unique happened during that first meeting. After the interview, Ángel stayed with me all afternoon while we continued filming the Encuentro Channel series. As we said goodbye, he told me to please not forget him. I told him I wouldn't forget and that I would come back to show him what we had done. It was hard to say goodbye because I felt something very special had happened. A few months later, the need to see him and keep the promise grew stronger. At that time, the only thing I could think of was to ask him to make a film together. I didn't know exactly what it was about; I imagined a sort of film diary, something that would allow us to stay in touch.

–We talked a lot with Ángel about what this film could be like; one thing was very clear from the start: when he picked up the camera, the first thing he did was film me. I understood that this way of sharing would completely destabilize the idea of someone being filmed and someone else filming. It was a process that, from the start, was built in an “in-between”; it became a way of sharing life while we filmed. Ángel had his own camera for when he was alone. We never agreed on a length of time. Before we knew it, there was already such a strong bond, we even forgot we were making a film. In ten years, anything happens.

–While there are other cases in which the camera aims to follow a character for years and film them, your film has unique elements. When did you realize that you needed to continue filming Ángel's life and growth?

–At first, I thought it was going to be an experience that spanned my childhood, but I remember a conversation with Ángel on a trip through Sapucai (Paraguay), a week after his father passed away. As we walked, he asked what would happen when his voice changed, if that was the moment when filming would end. I decided to tell him no, that we could continue and that it could even be an eternal film. That was the moment we realized we had to keep going because Ángel himself was demanding it. His intuition told him this was going to be a long journey.

–His time spans his childhood, then his adolescence, and his rapid transition to adulthood. You, on the other hand, are not the same as a filmmaker. It's a mutual maturation. Can you see today what changed from the beginning to the end of the film as a filmmaker, and what do you think you learned during that endless shooting time?

–After ten years of filming, I realize that it takes time to learn and make a film about “being there.” The industrial logic of cinema tries to make time effective and productive. A cinema about being there is the opposite: sometimes you don't even film, you're in time and you record what's changing, what contradicts something that came before, finding things in the variations and repetitions. Meanwhile, you're there, making images, waiting. I often wondered what we were waiting for to happen. The time of waiting is one of the greatest lessons, which has to do with cinema, but even more so with life. The truth is that meeting Ángel changed me forever, and that goes beyond the act of making films.

–There's a remarkable scene: the father who enters the frame and slowly leaves it. He's almost a specter, but that scene remains, because he's a secretly inescapable presence. Can you tell us more about Ángel's father and his influence?

–That passage is the last record we had of his father. In the hundreds of hours Ángel's camera recorded, that fixed shot was lost among so many others. Sometimes, Ángel would leave the camera recording for a long time and then leave. There are shots that take on a unique value after a while. The age difference between Ángel and his father was decisive. He had him at approximately 73; he couldn't film him much then. Eugenio, or Don Crespín, as he was known in Nanawa, was a very unusual man, an anarchist who, in the early 1990s, at an advanced age, emigrated to Paraguay from Argentina due to various crises. Ángel remembers that his father, who owned a business, would write poems on blackboards every day. He was a man with very firm ideals, very atypical and critical of this system. The film was enough to record the final period of his life; in Ángel's words, he is present, even in his life's decisions.

–It takes many years to film a person, but the cuts are the key. How did you conceive the editing?

–We worked on it in several stages: at first, we edited with Eugenia Campos Guevara and Lucas Olivares. We arrived at an eight-hour cut. From there, we moved on to work with our editor, Florencia Gómez García, with whom we had previously edited Las mil y una. It was an edit where ellipses and omissions played a key role in the conception of time. There are certain interruptions that are then resumed much later. We didn't want to follow a thread of causality, although we did want to respect the sensations that each shared life stage had developed. Depicting the experience of being at each age was very complex and challenging. We had to capture the mutations of a bond and demonstrate that these essential modifications required time, which meant avoiding forced syntheses that would end up atomizing the experiences and neglecting the process.

–In a film like yours, there will be no shortage of those who are suspicious about the relationship between the person filming and the person being filmed. Class distinction is an ethical question in aesthetics. What can you say about this?

–I would start by thinking about what we mean by a filmmaker: we could talk about heir filmmakers, filmmakers who may not work, filmmakers who will never make a living from film, filmmakers who are driving Uber, filmmakers who have been working at something else for a while, filmmakers from some remote neighborhood in some province, filmmakers who don't have a penny but need to get excited about something, filmmakers who studied film thanks to this country's public education system and are still waiting for an opportunity. It sounds like Borges' classification of that Chinese encyclopedia of animals, but I think it's necessary to think about the figure of the filmmaker.

Perhaps we should first begin to suspect the categories with which we read the world. Suspicion, likewise, always precedes the event and completes it in advance with the imagination, which is sometimes heavily prefigured by prior things. If the suspicion concerns who films and who is filmed, I find the question interesting because the film is populated by gestures that destabilize this binary logic. Over the course of ten years, the aesthetics of this film emerge from an ethic, and more than mise-en-scène, what is filmed comes from placing the body in an experience until the light of the moment splashes and the frame adapts to the shared life.