Joao Nicolau – director – John From
Joao Nicolau, director of John From, choses to have two different tones in telling us the story of a teenage girl flirting with an older neighbour. Her increasing obsession with the man brings the film form a regular, even close-to-documentary style to a more surreal one, with a stretch to comical situations that could be only in the gilr’s mind. But you’ll never know…
JOHN FROM: Rita is fifteen and this explains a lot. The full-fledged adolescent spends the long, hot summer days with her best friend Sara, doing the usual things people that age do: hairdos to fix and undo, code names to make up for each other, and of course someone to fall head over heels in love with. But instead of the usual high school classmate, the object of her palpitations is a forty-year-old photographer who just inaugurated an exhibit about Melanesia: to Rita, the distance between Portugal and Papua New Guinea is as short as the one between reality and fiction.