Gabe Klinger on ‘Isabel’: Brazilian Director talks to us about the beauty of nature, wine, and failure

Isabel, directed by Gabe Klinger and co-written with its star Marina Person, follows a sommelier in São Paulo who dreams of opening her own natural wine bar. Shot on 16mm, the film was screened in the Journey strand of the 70th BFI London Film Festival, where SNACK sat down with Klinger to talk about natural wine and showing failure on screen.

Let’s begin with wine. Why wine?

Wine is just a metaphor for talking about civilization, life, and creativity. Wine is something that brings people together, and I think the movie wants to talk about the idea of bringing people back together again. 

Wine is just a beautiful metaphor for collective life. And natural wine is seasonal wine, minimum-intervention wine. It’s wine that is really present on your palate in a different way from the industrial wines we’re used to from the supermarket. You feel it differently, and I wanted to make a film that you feel differently too.

How did you create the character of Isabel?

I first developed the character of Isabel on my own, and then I brought in Marina, the actress, to write the second draft of the script with me. Marina was very collaborative in that way. She’s a woman in her 50s who is constantly having to reinvent herself and think about the future, so she was able to help me add dimension to her.

When you picked the wines in the film, was there anything you were looking for?

There aren’t a lot of small wine productions, in Brazil or anywhere in the world. Small wineries, artisanal wineries, and minimum-intervention wineries were around five percent of consumption in the world, and then I think it doubled. I think it’s about ten percent now. But still, 90 percent of wine in the world is industrial, and only ten percent is artisanal and small-scale. I wish it was the opposite, but the economy is the way it is. 

In certain countries like Georgia, Armenia, certain regions of Italy, and Portugal, wine is made in a more sustainable way, with small vineyards and families. But for the most part, the land is very expensive and the risks are quite big: the wine might not come out well. 

The industrial wineries make so much money that that’s the way they protect themselves from failure. But it’s a shame, because then the quality of the wine decreases. So I wanted to pick wines that I thought were very good and that were the expression of people who were really interested in making good wine.

The film is set in a particular scenario and context. How did you design your shots?

The film was shot on 16mm: a photochemical, old-school process; kind of an unfiltered, noisy, messy process that could match the spirit of independent winemaking. 

It’s always risky, because when you’re shooting on 16mm you don’t know what the result is going to be until it comes back from the laboratory. So for a lot of the shots I had to be very resourceful and economical, because of limited time and a limited amount of film. You want to be very intentional about where you put the camera because you don’t have a lot of film or a lot of time. 

A lot of the locations were very small. I filmed part of the film in my own house, and I have a small living room, so there aren’t many positions for the camera. You have to decide between, like, four different options, which is the best one, in terms of height and position. 

You want to be right there with the characters. You don’t want to be a distant observer. You want to situate it and show enough context that you see their world, but not be so removed that we’re distanced from the emotions.

There have been a lot of Brazilian films on the world stage in recent years: films by Kleber Mendonça Filho, and last year’s The Blue Trail. What do you think has changed to make these stories resonate with the global audience?

I’m definitely riding a bit on the success of I’m Still Here and The Secret Agent. Those are two very successful Brazilian movies from the last couple of years. I’m very grateful, and personally I like those films a lot. 

I’m good friends with Kleber Mendonça Filho. I like his cinema and I defend it. I think we defend a similar idea of cinema: something very cinematic can be something very global in its language.

Isabel almost feels like a goddess, and yet you still feel her inner universe. How does it feel to work with an actress who is able to pull off this kind of performance?

It can be very hard sometimes, because you have to put them in an emotionally vulnerable position. I really admire actors. You want to protect them in a way. At the same time as you want to provoke them, you want to protect them, if that makes any sense. You want them to show vulnerability to the camera, but you don’t want to push them so far that it makes them emotionally volatile off the set. So it’s a tricky balance to find with actors.

But I think in our society today we project so much success that it was important for our movie to show failure. I really think it’s very important to talk about that. The ending of the film is very open-ended in that way, and some people are bothered by that. They think everything should be the same, I mean all the films and series. As soon as you start to experiment a little and do something different, they think it just doesn’t work. 

I think in our case, it’s not for me to judge whether it works or not. I just wanted to be able to show failure. And I think working with actors to achieve that is a really tough balance.