João Penalva

quero ver o 336 PEK inteiro, com urgência.

"For Joao Penalva, Lake Baikal is the perfect screen on which to project his amalgam of stories. The immensity of the place, its overwhelming natural statistics, its burgeoning flora and fauna, and all its human history provide a universal backdrop for the couples that appear in 336 PEK. Perhaps because the film has a Russian setting and the visual imagery is slowly paced, comparisons have been made between Penalva and Tarkovsky. A closer relationship, however, might exist between the ocean in Tarkovsky's Solaris and Penalva's Baikal. For Kelvin, the protagonist in Tarkovsky's story, the ocean reflects the desires and past histories of any mind that perceives it. It acts as a mirror, unimportant in itself but representing the story of Kelvin and his wife or Kelvin and his father - an ocean as backdrop to the story of couples. For Penalva, the Baikal is not the focus of the film yet its amorphous character easily absorbs the various stories that he has woven together."

Tarkovsky instantaneamente. (texto daqui)

e nem de propósito:
"The lake acts as a pretext for the gathering and binding of disparate narrative elements. This process of absorbing such diverse matter reveals another level of imitation within 336 PEK. In the classical tradition, imitation referred not so much to the mimicking of something or someone as the ability to transform that raw material into an entirely new work. This transformation was most commonly described by using the example of digestion and it finds its most powerful expression in Seneca's Epistles. In letter 84 'On Gathering Ideas' Seneca says we should gather ideas as bees cull nectar from flowers, transforming it into honey:" (...)

e ainda da mesma fonte:
"Translation (traditionally another form of imitation) at once represents the possibility of transforming a narrative from one language to another and the impossibility of ever acheiving a like-for-like transfer of meaning in that process. By placing the original text in the subtitles and ascribing the translation to the soundtrack, Penalva inverts cinematic hierarchies and exposes the gap in meaning that is at the heart of translation. We cannot understand the main text in the voiceover and we rush to find answers in the transient subtitles. In this way, 336 PEK is a genuinely 'foreign' movie - it confronts us with the distance between experience and language. It tells us that we are never at home."

a voz do próprio aqui.