DIRECTORS  STATEMENT

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       “José, you know what’s the problem with your script?”, the entire class was silent. That teacher was smashing and throwing away everyone’s scripts, along with their self-esteems. Now it was my turn, and I was about to explode. “The problem is I can’t see you on it.” And just like that, one of the best teachers I had on my film master degree in ESCAC, crashed my script. I was a month away from shooting my first short movie. Unfortunately, my ego activated his natural defenses, and instead of starting the script from the beginning, I argued with the teacher, until he was persuasive enough to convince me to focus only on 20% of the script, and erase all the rest. That 20% was a little Jehovah Witness boy that was going on his first house-to-house predicating day. One of the many little histories put together on the first version of the script, but the only one that had something to do with me. Just like Pablo, the child on my short film “Dios por el Cuello”, I too had to dress suits and ties on Sundays, and go door-to-door to speak with strangers about the end of the days and the God word. Just like him, I never went to a birthday party, not even my own, and I listened to same scary speeches that his mother gives him. Back in the days, in Portugal, and still now, a boy dressed up with a suit and a tie, is inevitably pointed as a “Jehovah”, a good reason to be mocked, not only from children, but also from adults. I was mocked innumerous times, and an insignificant thing like wear a tie, was traumatic for me. I was always trying to hide it, to remove it. It was like wearing a huge poster on my neck, saying: “I’m a Jehovah Witness, mock me!” And in some point, although I was a little boy, I was already refusing that intransigent God. That God was on my neck, struggling me, on my head, making me fear and guilty for wishing the same normal things that other boys had, like birthday parties, Christmas gifts, and even practice some kind of competitive sport or simply watch a random fight cartoon like Dragon ball. That same guilty and fear, made me one day throw away all my little fighting toys, like the GI JOE or a simple Superman toy, which, by the way, could made another short movie script, because it was really hard for me to do that. The strange thing was that no one forced me to do that, it was my own decision. I cannot say it was a traumatic childhood, but something of my personality is probably marked by my religious past. So it was really a challenge to talk about it in a creative way, like making a short movie. In the end, I think a lot of things where left out. Maybe there’s so much in it that I was not ready to letting all out in my first movie. But, in some way, it was a sort of relief, like when you get home from working and you remove a very tight tie from your neck.