Greek-Portuguese writer and director Paulo Marinou-Blanco (Empty Hands, Goodnight Irene) screened Dreaming of Lions, his absurdist black comedy film about assisted suicide and euthanasia, in the 10:30 p.m. slot at the fourth edition of the Red Sea International Film Festival on Friday night. But the cinema in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s Culture Square, its “new home of film,” was packed, and the audience reacted with much applause after experiencing the tragicomic rollercoaster ride that the movie provides.
Brazil’s Denise Fraga (The Other End) leads the cast of the film, which premiered at the recent Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, alongside 2022 European Film Promotion Shooting Star João Nunes Monteiro from Portugal. Asun Planas, Dinarte Freitas, António Durães, Alexander Tuji, Victoria Guerra, Sandra Faleiro, Joana Ribeiro (The Man Who Fell to Earth), and Roberto Bomtempo round out the cast.
Dreaming of Lions is the story of Gilda (Fraga), a terminally ill woman whose dying wish is for her painful existence to stop as quickly and peacefully as possible. When her attempts at ending her life fail, she seeks professional help and discovers a company called Joy Transition International where she meets Amadeu, who decided to become a mortician after his parents died in a “selfie-related accident.” When they have to engage in all sorts of ridiculous activities and she finds out that the organization may not be what it seems, they have to consider taking matters into their own hands.
“It comes from personal experiences, some of them related to my family,” Marinou-Blanco tells THR. “My father was ill for a long time in hospital but with no right to die. So he just kept being kept alive. And he was a sort of classic Southern European life lover and just didn’t want to drag things on. He just wanted to go. He just wanted to be able to die peacefully but he didn’t have that opportunity.”
At that time, the director’s father couldn’t speak anymore. “All he could do was sing,” Marinou-Blanco recalls. “And there is this song in the film that is something that he would actually sing to us. It’s called ‘Maracangalha.’ It’s very famous in Brazil.”
And it’s about a place in Bahia, Brazil. The filmmaker knew it but long thought that it was an imaginary place. “It wasn’t just a personal connection to my father. It also felt symbolical, which was amazing, because it’s kind of ‘I’m going to Maracangalha,’ like it’s a place after life that we don’t know what it is,” the director shares. But as he was finishing the film, a Brazilian producer friend from Bahia told him it was a real place that he used to actually go to. “Then he showed me on Google Maps, and there it was,” Marinou-Blanco said with a chuckle. “It’s a tiny, one-road town that actually exists.”
His personal experience also plays into the conception of the film and the character of Amadeu. “My personal experience, which is also tragicomic, is that I went through a period, like everyone does, of being somewhat depressed,” Marinou-Blanco explains. “And I had insomnia, just like Amadeu.” One day, he found and downloaded to his Kindle “a book, coincidentally, about euthanasia techniques, such as self-termination techniques,” he shares. “And then one night, I just lay in bed and started to read, you know, ‘put 10 milliliters of the solution into water,’ and I sleep like a baby and have no more insomnia.”
It was a key moment. “In a way, for me that was the first point where I got the idea for this film, because I realized that no matter how bad things are, you choose to live. It’s not an obligation,” Marinou-Blanco says. “You’re not condemned to it. It’s a choice, no matter how bad things get. You actually can choose to face them or not, and all of a sudden, that just gives you more courage somehow – the fact that you’re free. It’s not a prison, it’s not a sentence to live. And so that was the first stepping stone, along with my father’s experience.”
Funding for the project was easier than you may think. “The first time I applied for funding with the script, we got it in Portugal,” the writer and director tells THR. “Most people really connected with the script. Obviously, there were some rejections along the way, but it wasn’t that hard.”
The film’s title is a reference to Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, in which the character Santiago dreams of lions as a symbol of lost youth. “Titles are difficult,” Marinou-Blanco says. “I connected with this image of peace, of serenity, of happiness as something that Jill the wants, right? So something that Gilda never had, or doesn’t have now and is aspiring to have it.”
The filmmaker has shared during the festival that his mother has been bed-ridden for several years. So what was her reaction to Dreaming of Lions? “For a long time, she didn’t want to read the script. But then, she saw the completed film, and with tears, she just kind of hugged me,” Marinou-Blanco recalls. “That was it. And she said, ‘Thank you.’ Because the character of Gilda is also based a little bit on her, especially that strength, that passion for life she has.”
