FOUR KINDS OF LOVE IN THE AGE OF FEAR
A film by Antonio Rui Ribeiro

Logline
“Four Kinds of Love in the Age of Fear” is an existential film about belonging and unfulfilled dreams.

Synopsis

Four Kinds of Love in the Age of Fear deals with the issues faced by a London family as they have to fight a crisis on two fronts: on one side a loved one is suffering from Alzheimer’s, on the other they are faced with a crippling financial situation which threatens to disintegrate them. But in the whole, this is a positive story about inner-strength and staying together in spite of what life throws at us.

Shot in Lisbon and London, the film speaks of the difficulties of being distant from your loved ones as they age and start to die. Of the crushing financial pressures felt by a new destitute middle-class, struggling to make ends meet, out-priced in an expensive capital city.

Maria is in her late thirties and works as a teacher in a special school on the outskirts of London. She lives with her partner John a fitness instructor and their eight-year old daughter Olivia. A Portuguese citizen, Maria is faced with the unbearable challenge of trying to look after her mother Eunice, an eighty-year old woman, an Alzheimer sufferer living in a care home in Lisbon, Portugal.

But life in the UK is far from easy. With mounting debts, a young dependent and John’s precarious part-time work in the local gym, the family starts to fall apart. When Maria travels to Lisbon to try and sell her mother’s flat in order to be able to keep up with the care home bills, she is forced to confront her past, her dreams and the prospect of loosing the last anchor to the country where she once lived.

Film’s structure explained

The film is split into four chapters, all inhabited by a modern nuclear family, who make up our four main characters: John, late-thirties, British; Maria, late-thirties, Portuguese; Eunice, late eighties, Portuguese; and Olivia, an eight-years old, British born. The chapters do not follow a series of chronological events in terms of plot, providing instead four distinct episodes in the life of the family, each with a theme drawn from the ancient Greek’s four main definitions of Love. While the correlation between the meaning of these words and the four fragments presented in the film is more tangential than literal, here’s a more detailed explanation as to what they mean:

·στοργή  (Storge) means “love, affection” and “especially of parents and children”. It is natural affection, like that felt by parents for their offspring. Rarely used in ancient works, and then almost exclusively as a descriptor of relationships within the family. It is also known to express mere acceptance or putting up with situations, as in “loving” the tyrant.

·ἔρως  (Éros) means “love, mostly of a sexual nature. “The Modern Greek word “erotas” means “intimate love.” It can also apply to dating relationships as well as marriage. In the Symposium, the most famous ancient work on the subject, Plato has Socrates argue that eros helps the soul recall knowledge of beauty, and contributes to an understanding of spiritual truth, the ideal “Form” of youthful beauty that leads us humans to feel erotic desire – thus suggesting that even that sensually based love aspires to the non-corporeal, spiritual plane of existence; that is, finding its truth, just like finding any truth, leads to transcendence. Lovers and philosophers are all inspired to seek truth through the means of eros.

·φιλία (Philia) means “affectionate regard, friendship,” usually “between equals.” It is a dispassionate virtuous love, a concept developed by Aristotle. In his best-known work on ethics, Nicomachean Ethics, philia is expressed variously as loyalty to friends, family, and community, and requires virtue, equality, and familiarity.

·ἀγάπη(Agápe) means “love: esp. brotherly love, charity; the love of God for man and of man for God.” The noun form first occurs in the Septuagint, but the verb form goes as far back as Homer, translated literally as affection, as in “greet with affection” and “show affection for the dead”.

Approach and style

The film has a minimal cast of four main actors, a screenplay with sparing dialogue and makes use of social realism as a style throughout, with a few exceptions that punctuate key moments in the film. The pace is highly reflective, slow, gentle, Bergmanesque.

The film is spoken in English (for 70% of the duration) and Portuguese and will be shot using two Blackmagic Design pocket cinema cameras, chosen due to their small form factor and RAW recording capabilities. The quality of the image will provide a look with a distinctive 16mm feel, suitable for the language used in the film.

Director’s statement

Maybe this was mere coincidence, or a moment when the planets happened to be aligned in a certain way (if you believe in that kind of thing), but I happened to be reading Dostoyevsky’s“Notes from the Underground”, when I started writing the screenplay for this film. Many call this book the very first existential novel. It resonated with me in a special way, as like its narrator I am in my forties, asking myself some deep philosophical questions about my life. But that’s where similarities end.

This is a film that has been living inside my head for some time and gradually became more and more urgent to bring to fruition. There is a natural connection between the universe the characters inhabit and my own, as an immigrant from Portugal living in the UK since 1996. Within that context, the film touches on a subject that is dear to me: when people leave their native country in search of something that brings them closer to their dreams and ambitions, as they grow older they run a greater risk of loosing that original sense of direction, ending up doing things they did not originally anticipate. Especially when children come into the picture.

Although I don’t necessarily feel this has happened to me, it has always been my fear. This of course does not occur only to immigrants, but being abroad creates a specific set of circumstances, of challenges; namely, how do we deal with our parents ageing, their loneliness and health while living away from them? That is the dilemma Maria has to face up to, finding herself doing a job she doesn’t really enjoy and under huge financial pressure on two fronts, at home and abroad.

Similarly, the financial crisis John and Maria find themselves in, is something many middle class families in Britain have been dealing with, in particular since the financial crisis of 2008, giving rise to a new well educated but destitute middle class, to a new social divide and in John’s case, with huge consequences to his mental health.

But there is another reason why I have to make this film now. Being the son of Manuela Cassola, an established Portuguese actress who happens to turn ninety this year (although unlike the character of Eunice she does enjoy all of her faculties, thankfully!…) , I have a golden opportunity to work with her (maybe my last, hopefully not) and bring her brightness and clarity to embody Eunice’s character.

This is a low budget affair or a micro-budget film, as I don’t have time to wait another year or two for finance and that’s why Kickstarter is the ideal vehicle to fundraise for this project, so the fundraising target is the minimum budget required to turn the project into a feature film, shot with minimal cast and crew and a handful of locations (albeit in two countries). I know that I am able to bring the highest possible standards to the film and already have a unique production team assembled and a strategy to making it, capitalising on its strengths (equipment, cast, crew, contacts with A-list festivals) and weaknesses (lack of film financing).This film will be finished with 5:1 audio, colour grading finished in a Soho theatre and a DCP (Digital Cinema Print), ready for festival release.