When we speak about war, we seldom think about the women left behind on the battlefield. Cláudia Alves seeks to address this in her new project, pitched at Nebulae Arché section of DocLisboa 2020.
“Damas (Gentlewomen) will reveal the capabilities of Portuguese women in the rearguard battle of the First World War,” says Portuguese director Cláudia Alves of her chiefly archive-based Nebulae project. “But also the pain often caused by war. I want to know the feelings that lived there, looking for small and human things. I want to be closer to their failures than to their prowess and heroism. What are the desires, disappointments, and dreams of those women?”
Produced by Lisbon-based Ukbar Filmes, the 70-minute doc, budgeted at €125,000, is currently in development with delivery slated for December 2021.
During the First World War, a group of high-society ladies known as “gentlewomen nurses” left Portugal on a mission to build a hospital in Ambleteuse, Northern France, in order to take care of the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps.
Despite coming from a country that didn’t confer to women the same political and social rights that were due to men, the nurses had to overcome prejudice and innumerable obstacles, finally managing to open the hospital on the 9th of April 1918, the same day as dreadful Battle of La Lys.
“Letters, postcards, telegrams, photographs and pages of the ‘recreated diary’ will be the core of this film,” Alves comments. “To complement archive footage, we will have ‘real’ footage shot in Lisbon and Ambleteuse. The gesture of putting an ancient photo over ‘real’ landscape will be a resource that we will use to leap from past to present and vice-versa.”
“The colorization of some archive photographs, originally in black and white, will help viewers feel closer to the story and bring those moments to life,” she adds. “Whenever we dive into the photograph, adding sounds that transport us to that place and will also add colour.”
“For the past two years I has been working on the research and writing and development of this project. I crossed several obstacles during the process of writing the film treatment,” she says before articulating the challenges ahead.
“How to tell the story having as a starting point a full archive that has never been classified or organised and how to talk about the past that does not exist in history books. These are the difficult questions and the main challenges that we face in writing Gentlewomen,” she concludes.
