António Pedro

Eu Só Quero Ser (Aquilo que sou)

“I came across the Fronte[i]ras 07 meeting at a turning point of my life. After 10 years without flming and with an almost exclusive dedication to music (although almost always contaminated by cinema and other arts), I bought a video camera and decided to start flming again. In this case, a flm about my father, an anonymous public servant, who recently had died in a car accident. When I read the proposal to refect artistically on the idea of boundaries, I realized that I was “bounding myself” in a way that was contrary to my nature.Raising boundaries in myself, telling myself not to go there, that that is not my territory. But the truth always fnds its ways–if we give it, or rather if we give our selves, attention. “I just want to be who I am” was a phrase that I found in a magnifcent exhibition of Thomas Hirschhorn at Serralves Foundation and wrote down on my notebook along with some new goals for the year 2007. In fact, this phrase sums up a search that I began in my adult hood,when I frst became slightly aware that I needed to dig through many layers of mud in order to get access to my essence. The fnal result was what I called a “Live Poetic Documentary”,a very personal piece hopefully with a universal resonance. A performance about the search for an identity, a house, the meeting between our various selves. On the importance of being aware of what surrounds us, the need for the courage to fnd our truth, the respect for our wishes. And about how being lost is necessary to fnd ourselves, and how can chaos and dreams show us paths. All of this was brought about spontaneously and in an unplanned way and it was born from my improvisation and interaction with the space and the people who surrounded meduring those days. I tried to blur some boundaries between the screen and the live performance, a limitation that I feel when I make more conventional flm-concerts, in which flms were not thought to have live music and where the viewer’s attentionis divided between two separate things. Between planned and improvised, this presentation also tried to tinker with the boundaries between documentary and fction, and between silentand sound flm (part of the flm has sound, another part doesn’t). At the end of the presentation, in Barcelos, obviously the reaction wasn’t unanimous. There were some people who liked and others who disliked it or didn’t know what to say. But I felt better thanever! The one who had been there was really me. And I just want to be who I am. And in Fronte[i]ras 07 I was.”