Marco Del Fiol – The Space in Between: Marina Abramovic in Brazil #LFF2016

PODCAST | Matt Micucci interviews Marco Del Fiol, director of the documentary The Space in Between: Marina Abramovic in Brazil from the 60th BFI London Film Festival.

he celebrated Serbian artist Marina Abramovic decided to set off on travels across the country of Brazil, a country which she had traveled through before and that fascinated and influenced her throughout her life. This time, she went through various rituals that, in many ways, echoed her works in art that dealt with discovering the limits of the body.

She also decided to travel with director Marco Del Fiol, whose journey in making this film lasted four years, as he tells us in the story, and the end result was this documentary: The Space in Between: Marina Abramovic and Brazil. He also tells us why he thinks that this time, Abramovic’s journey was different, both emotionally and physically. Besides this, and many other things we discuss, he talks about representing the artist’s innermost thoughts, especially in the moments where a visual representation was cinematically required; in other words, in the moments where not much was happening on the outside, but lost was going on inside the mind of Marina Abramovic.

Finally, Del Fiol also discusses the country of Brazil. He specifies “the title of the film is Marina Abramovic and Brazil because Brazil is a character in the movie.”

THE SPACE IN BETWEEN: MARINA ABRAMOVIC AND BRAZIL. This is a bold and unsettling plunge into the unknown. The inimitable Serbian artist Marina Abramovic has long been fascinated by Brazilian mystical traditions. Seeking out methods of personal and emotional healing, she embarks on an introspective journey deep into the Brazilian interior in order to further push the limits between the physical, the spiritual and the arts. Abramovic is utterly captivating as she recounts her fearless and often jaw-dropping experiments at the hands of various mediums, crystal healers and shamans, culminating in a beguiling Ayahuasca ceremony. Director Marco Del Fiol infuses a good dose of humour to the proceedings, and employs a visual style that creates space to capture the artist engaging with nature and the elements. It’s a fascinating journey with one of the most unpredictable and mesmerising artists of our times.