Rob Munday
There are positives and negatives when it comes to telling personal stories. On the one hand, no one knows the material better than you, but on the flip side, a close connection to the narrative means you can become too precious, too hesitant to cut what needs to be cut. For Regina Pessoa and her 2019 short film Uncle Thomas: Accounting for The Days, this isn’t just a film about her “strange” Uncle, but a narrative that explains how her love for art began – and surely it doesn’t get much more personal than that?
“You had no regular job, you had no wife, you had no children. Even as a little girl, I felt you were a bit strange”. The opening lines of the young’s Regina’s voiceover in Uncle Thomas tells you a lot about one of her closest and most eccentric relatives. A man with obsessive tendencies, though many found him too odd to grow fond of, it’s clear from Pessoa’s film that she was not one of them. This isn’t a short with the sole objective of trying to explain Thomas’ actions or unravel his complexities, but a film that revels in their time together, a testament to the memories they shared and a tribute to an “important” person in the filmmaker’s life – as she explains, in this interview with Ben Mitchell, for Skwigly:
“I always knew that he had a different personality and an obsession with numbers. These numbers and objects fascinated me as a child and I always had this intention to do something about uncle Thomas and how important he was for me. I found that, while he was not an ‘important person’, he was important to me. I wanted to show with my film that it isn’t necessary to be exceptional to be important to someone. This was my personal statement with this film.”
With its narrative based around a letter she wrote to her uncle, Pessoa amplifies the intimate, genuine feel of her short by including a number of Thomas’ personal belongings – penknives, glasses, a large collection of notepads in which he did his “calculations” – within her animation. Blending stop-motion sequences, including the aforementioned items, into her more recognisable 2D style, the filmmaker admits that it was a challenge to “find a way to integrate all of these techniques into a visual whole”. It works though, it really does. As the voiceover starts to paint a picture of uncle Thomas, his physical possessions help us to achieve a greater sense of the man he was – complex, complicated, but full of love for his niece.
An example of the mixed-media approach used to great effect in Uncle Thomas
I started this article by talking about the difficulties of tackling personal stories in film and the pitfalls that might hinder them from becoming enjoyable and relatable – Uncle Thomas is a fine example of a short that gets it right. The specifics of the situation may be individual to Pessoa alone, but we’ve all known people who are a little “different”, people who may find themselves on the edge of society’s norms and we’ve all probably witnessed the impact these people can have on our lives. The world would be a very boring place if we were all the same and Pessoa’s film is a welcome reminder of this.
If you’re new to the work of Regina Pessoa, her debut in short film dates back over 20-years to 1999 and her work in between that and Uncle Thomas includes another two shorts, which have seen her pick up a number of awards and nominations at film festivals around the world. Having waited years for her 2012 festival favourite Kali, the Little Vampire to come online (still waiting…), I’m happy to finally share Pessoa’s filmmaking here on S/W, I hope you all enjoy it as much as I do.