São Paulo – Brasília’s short film “Punishment” won the best film award at Algeria’s Digital Gate International Film Festival (DGIFF). Directed by Iago Kieling, the film also won the best actor award for Lúcio Campello.
The 16-minute short film was directed by 23-year-old Kieling, and this was his first film. He told ANBA it is a reinterpretation of Crime and Punishment by Russian author Dostoevsky. “But it’s not an adaptation, it’s just a reinterpretation of the setting and characters adapted to our reality in Brazil and our perspective,” he told ANBA.
The protagonist has no lines, and the movie have only four short dialogues. “He’s a carpenter and is reliving traumas from the past, dealing with poverty and the disease he seems to have. A dying man, he ends up having a breakdown and remembers things from the past. The film is a portrait of the protagonist from a psychoanalytic perspective of his relationship with his mother, his childhood and the traumas affecting how he relates to the female figure,” Kieling says. It features scenes from the past and the present in a non-linear order, metaphors, and the director plays with the real, the unreal and even the surreal.
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The film was Kieling’s end-of-course project with producer Caio Almeida and art director Benny Leite. They graduated in Social Communication from the Catholic University of Brasília (UCB) in 2018. The film’s crew featured around 30 people and a crowdfunding with friends, colleagues and relatives helped to reach the budget of BRL 5,000 (USD 923). Since it was a college work, nobody was paid for the job, Kieling explained. The film took four days of recording.
Punishment was completed in late 2019 and launched in 2020, when it entered in five foreign and two Brazilian festivals. The director believes his film won because of its experimental approach. “It departs from a chronological order and is very symbolic, and I believe festivals appreciate that. It’s a very interesting feeling to represent our country, receiving feedback, and seeing that a Brazilian independent piece has come so far is very encouraging. Cinema is all about that – being watched and creating sensations and feelings across different places,” he said. The film hasn’t a release date yet. This is the first award the film and the director receive. Kieling has now his own production company in Brasília and plans to produce other movies with Almeida and Leite.
The Algerian festival does not offer a prize money but published a certificate for the winners. Two other Brazilian short films came in third, Unaware by Tarcisio Coelho Borges The Possible View by Mariana Costa and Rafael Lobo.
The festival selected 56 films from 17 countries, including Brazil, United Kingdom, France, Iran, India, Spain, Sweden, Nigeria, and Finland. Arab movies from Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Oman, Morocco, Iraq, Jordan and Syria were selected as well. The ninth Algerian festival took place in December. The winners were made public on January 1st.
Watch the teaser of Punishment:
Translated by Guilherme Miranda
