Jose Vieira - Immigration is for life
This interview was first published in The Prisma Multicultural Newspaper on April 3rd 2023 where it can be read in full with images at:
https://theprisma.co.uk/2023/04/03/jose-vieira-immigration-is-for-life/
Fleeing the Portuguese dictatorship with his family in 1965 shaped his desire to investigate the interior and exterior reality of emigration. He speaks about the shame of being forced to leave your roots for economic and political reasons. When politicians criminalize migrants, while permitting their exploitation, film must speak out.
Graham Douglas
José Vieira’s film output is unique, eight films that tell the story of Portuguese emigration during the Salazar dictatorship, and more recently documentaries on the experiences of Romanians in Western Europe. Between 1960 and 1974, 1.4 million Portuguese people left a country of only 10 million. Travelling clandestinely, they crossed the mountains at night into Franco’s Spain, and then on to France, where they were a welcome source of cheap labour in the building industry. At the time, it was the biggest migration in Europe after the Second World War. They were escaping poverty, but also the accelerating wars in Africa, where Portugal was attempting to hold on to its colonies in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. In 1974 the revolution that ended the dictadura began in the colonies, and was led by the army.
Vieira acknowledges the unique cultural factors that influence migrants’ responses to forced relocation, but also emphasizes the feelings common to any migrant. He insists on the need to hear their voices. Speaking with passion he rejects a re-writing of history that suits the ruling classes. Immigrants are not heroes, he says: erecting statues to them and constantly talking about the dignity of their sacrifice, is a way of sanitizing the brutal exploitation that these same classes engaged in at the time.
In an interview with Carlos Campos, for the LEFFEST festival he explained his approach: ‘Working on memories is not a matter of making packaged conversations to facilitate nostalgia (…) It is to situate images and words in the context of a history that was confiscated, to re-appropriate our sensibility for the world we live in, and to better decipher it.’
Despite this, migration did bring liberation, and most of all for women. He began by making videos in protest at the abuse of immigrants he witnessed in France in the 1980s, and modestly he says that his mastery of cinematography today is still somewhat ‘succinct’.
The Prisma spoke to him between presentations of his films at the LEFFEST festival in Lisbon.
