Regina Pessoa Exhibition: Tragic Story with Happy Ending

December 9th 2008—January 4th 2009, International Centre of Graphic Arts (MGLC)
Exhibition Opening: December 9th at 15:00, MGLC

The stories I like to tell are always simple ones, about people I've known. Some are still alive, others dead. They have had anonymous lives which have been somewhat ignored. They have gone unnoticed by the world and have been rapidly forgotten. I am interested in the mysteries, the little dramas and the poetry hidden in their apparently banal lives. They are my heroes and role models. The ideas for this film came from an engraving and silk screen print I was working on when I was studying at the Fine Arts School. Each phrase inspired an engraving and each image suggested a new phrase and thus new technical and aesthetic challenges emerged. A long production process followed...

We are following a girl and we discover that she is not the same as other people. She is "different". The cause of her difference does not bother the community in which she lives as her suffering is of a very individual nature. The community and the girl react to the difference, the former by showing their intolerance, the latter by isolating herself. With time the community finally and rather coldly gets used to the presence of the difference, keeping it at a distance, but at the same time allowing it to become part of the daily bustle of their lives. Differences exist, persist and are ever present. Some times there is a reason for their existence and they correspond to temporary states of transit to other states of existence, other times they are fatal ... Nevertheless, those who live them must accept them in order to achieve a deeper knowledge of themselves and a better awareness of the world. One day she will go away and leave the community which will understand, albeit too late, that that strange character they had always kept at a distance had ended up mysteriously becoming part of their lives...

In my previous film The Night (A Noite) I used engraving over plaster plates, animated directly under a camera. This work produced very interesting graphic results, but was very morose, solitary and laborious. In Tragic Story with Happy Ending (História trágica com final feliz), I wanted to continue to use engraving, because it is a technique with a very attractive graphic potential, particularly in terms of the play of light and shade that it allows. I have found from my previous experience that the work of animation and completion needs to be made lighter and less tedious. As a result, I divided the work with two other animators and three illustrators, finishing the drawings using a small team of six people who utilized a special engraving technique that I had developed to obtain the results I wanted: the animation drawings were photocopied onto a special paper, intended for posters, which were then coated in a black china paint and scraped, which gave them a very similar appearance to a scraper board.

Towards the end, we also made use of the potential that the computer offers us, particularly in combining the different levels of animation with the scenery and making one or another movement of the camera.
Regina Pessoa