BARBOSA OFFERS DYNAMIC MIX OF FICTION AND DOCUMENTARY
Brazilian filmmaker brings late friend ‘back to life’ in Gabriel and the Mountain
When he first heard his old high school classmate Gabriel Buchmann had gone missing in the mountains between Malawi and Mozambique in 2009, Fellipe Barbosa was optimistic that he would be found alive.
The Brazilian filmmaker began sketching out an idea for what he thought could be his first feature, a “survival movie,” filled in with Buchmann’s anecdotes once his friend was found. That all changed once his body was discovered, but the idea of making a film on Buchmann’s final days remained.
“I had to think of another way of doing it,” Barbosa said, sitting in a Mile End café on Thursday morning, “which led to trying to tell his story through the point of view of the real people he met.”
Gabriel and the Mountain premièred as part of Cannes Critics’ Week in May, winning the France 4 Visionary Award. It screens Friday and Tuesday as part of the Festival du nouveau cinéma, and opens for a theatrical run Friday at the Cineplex Forum.
It turned out to be Barbosa’s second feature, as piecing together Buchmann’s 70-day, seven-country odyssey up to his untimely demise took time. Barbosa had been to Uganda for three months in 2007, and he could understand his friend’s boundless affection for the African continent.
“I changed my (return) ticket many times,” he said. “I didn’t want to leave. I was very much in love with the place. So I recognized Gabriel’s happiness of being there. He just went further with that idea of never leaving.”
Barbosa returned to Africa in 2011, retracing Buchmann’s steps and keeping a journal of his experiences, just like his subject had. But it took until 2015 before he realized that he needed not only to revisit the places Buchmann had been to, but to track down the friends he had made along the way.
The trouble was, Buchmann made a point of travelling on the cheap and getting as close as he could to the everyday lives of real Africans. His journals contained names and some old phone numbers, his emails to family held more clues, and the recollections of his girlfriend Cristina, who joined him on part of the trip, yielded others.
“It was sometimes very hard to find these people,” Barbosa said. “Every time I found somebody, it was incredibly gratifying and emotional — I really loved these people, I thought they were beautiful characters. Then I became sure I had to find the next one. It took two months to find 13 people.”
To find one tour guide, Johnny Goodluck, Barbosa climbed up and down Mount Kilimanjaro, then waited at the front gates holding up a photo on an iPad and asking guide after guide if they knew him, until one did.
On another occasion, he had to get past the animosity of a safari operator who had had a misunderstanding with Buchmann and didn’t want to talk to any friend of his.
The wildest coincidence occurred with a person Barbosa had given up on, a beggar in Zanzibar who had shown Buchmann and Cristina around.
“I had deleted him from the
script, because I didn’t have time to look for him and I thought it wasn’t that important,” Barbosa said. “We were shooting a scene in the hotel where they had stayed and we stopped a bit early. I was sitting in front of the hotel, wondering what to do next, and a Nigerian guy comes to me saying he needed money because he was sick. I looked at him and asked, ‘By chance, do you know Gabriel Buchmann?’ He said, ‘Sure, he’s my Brazilian friend.’ “
A late-night phone call from Buchmann’s mother brought the phone number of Lenny, one of the closest friends her son had on his trip. And it took some persistence to convince Lewis, Buchmann’s final tour guide in Malawi, to talk, “mostly because (he felt) culpability,” the director surmised.
Barbosa used professional actors (João Pedro Zappa and Caroline Abras) for the two lead roles, and cast the real people Buchmann had met to play themselves.
The result is a dynamic blend of fiction and documentary, capturing his friend in all his contradictions as he tried get the real tourist experience while stubbornly resisting being labelled a tourist. For the director, it was a way of paying tribute to Buchmann’s voracious appetite for adventure, and to mark the end of his journey.
“I wanted to bring him back to life through fiction,” Barbosa said. “If I had made a documentary, everything would have been in the past — he would always be dead. The idea was to try to resurrect him through the film so that he could understand he died.
“I think the moment of passing must be a very delicate moment. He died because of exposure, which is a very sweet death. He probably didn’t understand that he had died. He just went to sleep believing he was going to wake up the following day, and that never happened.”