The first feature for any director is a special thing, but it is also often highlighted as one of the utmost achievements in filmmaking. It not only shows that you start how you mean to go on, but it brings excitement as a strong new creative quickly comes on the map. But with such a huge task, how does one approach this and what should it reflect? Should it encapsulate the unique thing you want to bring to the medium? Should it amass all your influences to create a strong range? But, most importantly, should a debuting filmmaking be thinking about any of this?
Sitting through Ico Costa’s debut feature Alva was, for me, not the easiest of experiences. It demanded attention, empathy and commitment which I was either not ready and willing to give or it simply didn’t entice me to give. And as the film progressed I could feel much of my audience felt the same with seats slamming behind me as six or more people left the screening. It also struck me as Ico came to introduce the film that we were only an audience of, perhaps, 20-30. As such when Ico wandered to the stage, to deliver a Q&A to just over a dozen viewers of his debut film’s UK premiere, I anticipated a fully deflated man mourning what could only be seen as a failed premiere.
Yet, regardless, he came to the front casually and slowly, as questions came, he ignited with a passion for his film and its process. He explained how the film came about, through his history with a specific region in Portugal and its inhabitants (who became the film’s non-actor actors). He discussed his love for celluloid film from its process on set to its aesthetic. All the while shrugging off compliments towards the film and aloof readings, merely explaining what he had done and what had interested him in the process. His composure through all of this—humble, talkative and even awkward—made me realise how special it is to be having a Q&A with a debut filmmaker (and here I mean debut as their first professional foray into anything, not the debut film of a long-standing actor or fashion designer).
During a Q&A you usually look for answers, knowledge about the bigger picture of what film is, how it works, what its societal goals, impacts and ends are. But here we got almost the opposite, a man at the beginning of his road excited to share the things that interest and inspired him throughout the making of the film itself without many answers or points of real profundity. Here, I also began thinking what it really meant to debut your first feature. It strikes me, someone who looks up that mountain with a level of resistance and fear, that completing a first feature is simply a huge achievement in itself—let alone something with excellent stylistic coherence, mood and vision. It seemed to me that Ico had no huge goal in sight and no real deeply profound message to present to an audience (often, what 20-something does). Instead the film was done out of love and passion to further his knowledge and ability with the craft, loving the process, loving working with non-actors and somewhat liking the subject matter. And through this I’m sure he has developed a phenomenal amount.
This nonchalant approach to a debut was hugely refreshing to see in person, reminding me that in fact most of my favourite filmmakers started with films that pale in comparison to their later works; Jia Zhangke, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wong Kar-wai, Takashi Miike, Gaspar Noé, Park Chan-wook, Andrei Tarkovsky, Paul Thomas Anderson, and the list can go on forever. In fact perhaps the whole notion of the glorious debut is so hugely unfounded, that it instead ends up glorifying filmmakers like Ana Lily Amirpour, Quentin Tarantino, Orson Welles, Jordan Peele, David Lynch, Terrence Malick or Darren Aronofsky who rarely (if ever) recreate the glory of their debut films. Such a notion of the debut being the film that defines your career given these examples seems to be nonsensical. Either the bar is set too high, and the cult following received becomes too great too fast, that one rarely breaks the mould again, or one builds themselves up slowly piece at a time—creating a clearly plotted trajectory of development and improvement along the way. I can only feel that this latter group, those who debut before their peak, are the more dedicated to cinema. It isn’t the success of a debut that defines and propels forward their career, it is them themselves.
Coming back to Alva, it must be impossibly difficult to walk into the UK premiere of your debut feature to see only a handful of faces, and witness as almost a third of them leave during the screening. But for Ico Costa to still come on stage with the passion and love he has for his film makes me sure that his debut was a success. It proved to him that he can make a coherent feature film. More that than, one that is accepted and screened by an establishment as prestigious as the ICA—valued by an establishment even if not by their audience.
I could not recommend Alva as a film, but it certainly reminded me that the idea of a debut feature as something to fear is completely misleading. A debut film is just another film and the best cinema is always created from a passion, love, intrigue, and need to create. And when such a need is satiated it becomes clear how formative an experience it was.
So why wait? That idea, go make it happen.
Alva (2019)
0/2/0
2/13