Baan | Leonor Teles

Is being at home a necessity? Is homesickness the destiny of migrants and travellers? Baan (Casa – “home”) tells us another story, the one of spiritual nomads, multi-geographic biographies, unknown origins... the story of two women, L. and K., who are not searching for one home – the original one or a future one – but for a feeling: feeling at home. This feeling can be embodied by a multi-cultural city like Lisbon or, even better, by a mixture of an experienced-or-imagined combination of Lisbon and Bangkok, an ideal place that is actually the mobile territory of a relationship. L. and K. feel at home when they are together, and Baan tells the drama of the difficult recognition of this both simple and complex truth.

Feelings are also the compass for Leonor Teles to tell the story, following a sharply edited pace, whose coherence relies entirely upon the emotional tonalities of the protagonist-actresses, thanks also to a highly collaborative process of creation. On this emotional line, the young Portuguese filmmaker builds a rather original filmic style,  comprised of colourful compositions (she is behind the camera herself), expressive gestures, musical insertions, and a playful dialectic between two far cities – a style that could even have dared to reduce the number of dialogues and textual explanations.

Baan is a brilliant first feature, one that motivated Filmexplorer to meet Leonor Teles in Locarno in order to discuss her style and way of filmmaking.