nos

starting music

Teresa Cardoso de Menezes (soprano)

Nuno Vieira de Almeida (piano)

La Sposa son disprezzata, by Vivaldi

Mixed by José Fortes.

Recorded for the film at Xangri-l Studios,

Lisbon, February 2003

Francisco and Angela are survivors, but solitude in the big city is a difficult punishment to bear. The protagonists' path is dramatically marked by an emotional evolution that progressively removes them from their previous lives going towards catharsis.

The light, the colors, the size of the sets, the music, the sound design and editing all reflect this progression. The creation of pleasure and entertainment places, such as erotic bars (conceived and purpose-built for the film), are also the expression of and the possibility for the characters' dramatic change. The bringing together of the two solitudes reveals the twisting paths of interiority.

Arena Bar

Lydia Lunch / Clint Run

cd: Stinkfist

song: Meltdown, 1996

Lydia Lunch

song: Lady Scarface

Oceanarium

Maria João e Mário Laginha

cd: Undercovers

song: Charles on a Sunday with Sunday clothes

Universal Music Portugal

2002

«A film about solitude, the difficulties of communication and the search for love, Nós places Francisco and Angela in an ambiance that, according to Cláudia Tomaz, oscillates «between the realism of everyday routine and the dream-like power of the encounters of these two characters». Free after six years in prison, Francisco decides to change and fight. After a few days spent living in the subway, he rents a room and starts working at a construction site. Forlorn, he puts an ad on the Internet - «man seeks woman to talk» - and meets the serious, shy and unhappily married Angela. She works in a big hotel with her friend Maria, who is young, exuberant, full of life and performs in erotic shows at night to make ends meet.

Inspired by the photographs of Nan Goldin, the paintings of Francis Bacon - «because of the colors, the flesh and the sexual violence between the characters» - and by the music of Lydia Lunch that provides the basis for the choreography in one of the bars - Arena - the filmmaker embodies the ambiguous and contradictory feelings of the two characters by prioritizing, as she did in her first film Noites, images over words. And silence over language.

To give «density» to this silent, Claudia worked systematically the sound, substituting «the dirty and strident sound ambience of the town for a more delicate and softer sounds», which provides the viewer, as it does the characters, with an enveloping «sensory» experience. As for the visuals, they concentrate on the protagonist’s torment: loneliness, filmed for the most part in static shots, their difficulties in talking to one another, expressed to the wide open and almost colorless places they meet in, matched by the scenes in bars which are darker and more dynamically edited.»

In Locarno International Film Festival catalog