One of the standout screenings at Arquiteturas Film Festival this year, Skin of Glass or Pele de Vidro starts as a personal narrative, of a daughter trying to know her father through his architectural masterpiece. Through its unexpected crescendo, it develops into a broader social, political and ultimately human story; in this interview director Denise Zmekhol takes us behind the screen.

The conversation has been developed within the context of "Learning to Unlearn", 11th edition of Arquiteturas Film Festival. KoozArch accompanies the festival invited by INSTITUTO, with the support of DGArtes / Ministry of Culture of Portugal.

SHUMI BOSE / KOOZ Denise, thank you for finding the time to speak today, amid the many international screenings for your film Skin of Glass. I think of you as both a journalist and a filmmaker. How did you find your path?

DENISE ZMEKHOL That’s right, I studied journalism, but I was always very attracted to images, so I started learning about photography. During the very last year of journalism, we started doing film, videos — at the time, it was Super 8. And I loved it, I'm a very visual person. So I realised that I express myself better with images. That's how I connected with film.

KOOZ In the film, we see that as a young person you witnessed a lot of changes in terms of Brazil’s political climate. Could you maybe talk about some of the shifts in narrative, in terms of what was happening to the city of São Paulo, to Brazil — in order to situate the story of the film?

DZ The story I tell in the film starts when I was a very small kid, so I didn't really understand what was going on. My grandparents are from Lebanon and Syria; my father came to Brazil when he was a year and a half old. I was born two years before Brazil fell under a military dictatorship. Things were changing a lot when I grew up; I was a teenager in the 70s, when things got very violent. Right after the Cold War, the whole world was scared of communism; there was a great fear of Brazil becoming communist.

I grew up entirely under the dictatorship; there are books we couldn't have at the house — we couldn't have any books by Marx or Engel; we couldn't talk very openly about politics, as we were always afraid someone in the group would inform other people how we think. We were always concerned about how we talk about politics and with whom.A friend’s brother was being persecuted by the military, so he fled to Chile — then some years later, as you know, Chile had a dictator too.The US was always acting against leftist governments all over Latin America — because communism had already happened in Cuba, and they were really scared that it was going to spread.

In fact, I moved to the US when I was in my early twenties, and it was while I was there that people in Brazil started fighting for democracy again. So when I returned, it was another Brazil: Brazil was a new country! It was happy; people had many hopes and dreams that it could be a better place. So that was my relationship with the change: being born almost at the start of a dictatorship and twenty years later, being able to see a free, democratic country again, where we wrote a new constitution. That was a very interesting and beautiful time.

KOOZ I'm thinking about this point, where you start to question what you're being told about your political context, and about Brazil. If I remember, that's also when you started questioning things with your dad and for whom he had been working. For me, that desire for more understanding and questioning's the very impetus of the film, both at the scale of personal but also national or even societal narrative.

DZ Yes. There were moments where I would ask my father about his position during the military coup. But then, I also remember listening to protest songs at home. But the main quest for the personal story was to try to get to know my father who I lost so young, and to regain something after our last fight.

KOOZ The building — formerly known as the Edifício Wilton Paes de Almeida — seems to crystallise something about that quest through its history — which becomes obscured after some time. Let’s talk about the building at the centre of the film for a moment.

DZ I think the building that my father designed is a great reflection of Brazil — and also a little bit of my relationship with him. There was a moment when I was not allowed inside my father's home with his second family; I couldn't get inside the building. I don't say this explicitly, but for me it is very obvious when I was not able to get inside the building, that there are some parallels there for me.

So the building was designed around 1960–1961, when my father was just over thirty. It was a very special building in its use of technology: it was a glass curtain-wall design all the way around, which is where the facade or glazing is completely separate from the structure of the building. I believe at that time in Brazil, there was only one building with a single curtain wall facade, made by Niemeyer in Rio de Janeiro — but that building had three concrete facades and one curtain wall. This notion of having an open floor plan with glass all around was something very unique in Brazil. They imported special glass from Belgium, they brought marble from Greece — so it was also a very expensive building. Very prestigious and beautiful for its time.

KOOZ And if I remember correctly, the client had a glass company themselves?

DZ That’s right. It was a holding of different companies, including a glass company; naturally, they wanted to have a beautiful glass building for those offices. It was a very special building; it took seven years to be constructed and people would come downtown to look at it from all over, because it was so impressive at the time to have this beautiful fully glazed tower. This is why the building was called Pele de Vidro, or ‘skin of glass’.

KOOZ Perhaps as important as the Seagram Building in New York — including the connotations of corporate wealth and materiality. It seems very much ‘of its time’, offering an international iconicity. Your use of archival material in the film really helps us to understand how visionary it was.

DZ Right? Very visionary, very special. I think the building symbolises this golden age of modern architecture in Brazil, the first art that we exported to the world. This was the time of innovation, the time of progress. Later, the owner was being boycotted by the military and lost the building to the bank state. After that, the building became the headquarters of the Federal Police: not the place where they imprisoned or tortured people, but where they were conducting censorship operations and so on.

KOOZ Surely the most beautifully designed headquarters the Federal Police ever enjoyed.

DZ The Social Security offices were also there, alongside the federal police. Eventually, they abandoned the building and the country changed too. Due to our great problems with the lack of housing, the building started to be informally occupied. The first time this happened, they had to leave after a year or so. But then another group came later and stayed in the building, which led to the tragedy —

KOOZ At this point, we have to warn our readers for film spoilers. Before we get to the later chapters of the building's history: You've seen various people use the building and then at a certain point, it is occupied by squatters — which is a form of vandalism. In the film, you also went on a journey in terms of how you're feeling about the building and its use; frankly, there's a concern for the architecture and how it might be better protected.

DZ The film is very honest; that was the first reaction I had to the conditions of the occupation. I was in shock because as well as a landmark building, it was my father's masterpiece. So my first reaction, when I saw the building in that condition in 2017, was to say Oh my God, look what happened. Through the film, I got to know the housing movement and understand what's going on with the city, and the urgent need for shelter. So I had a change of heart as I was making the film — and it is in the film — you’re going through a journey in my heart.

KOOZ A building may have many uses; one function may be as an asset or property, which complicates the way we can think about utility. As with the Grenfell Tower in London, the loss of a building can show us what and whom we prioritise and how we treat our citizens. Are you now motivated to stay connected to the housing movement?

DZ I think the loss of the building was a big one. It was awful, really sad. We lost lives; people were not found among the rubble. The city lost the building, which was very beautiful, it was a landmark. It should have been protected. Personally, I felt my father was dying again; I was somehow looking for him inside the building. It was a big shock when the fire happened.

When you make a film and you get involved with people, you make friends, you are connected with them. We are going to have a premiere screening of the film in Brazil in October. That will be the first time I’ll be sharing it with the public there — and of course I want people from the different occupations to see it. But I'm a filmmaker; the film has a political story, but I'm not an activist. I wasn’t making an activist film. My contribution is in making and telling stories about important issues, like I made before — like Children of the Amazon. My goal was to invite people to take a personal journey, so they could open their hearts. By the time we get to the political and social issues, I hope viewers are open to seeing the story with more humanity. I didn't want to tell people what's right and wrong in the beginning.

KOOZ When you started making the film, I guess the personal journey was high in your priorities — you could not have foreseen the eventual and tragic fate of the building, which happened while you made it.What were you hoping for when you started?

DZ I wanted to get to know my father and his artistry. And I wanted to get to know the people living inside the building and to tell their stories. Of course it was personal because my father was the architect of the building — but that claim became even stronger when the fire happened. That big shock made me stop and think, and that's when I decided to make the story even more personal.

I filmed during 2017–2019, but I did not start editing again until 2021. I had time to really process things and even look at the film differently. As I was starting to edit, I felt that there would be another way to tell the story. I think personal stories are always helpful for people to connect in different ways. I wanted to touch everyone through the personal story and let them open their hearts and follow, you know, follow me in this journey. That was until I discovered that the people organising or coordinating this occupation were deeply unethical, unlike many other occupations. So I had the chance to learn about the housing movement from people who are doing the right thing; I realised there are many more people doing the right thing than not.

The film is very honest in that it follows my own journey of learning how things were being done, in terms of the housing movement. That was a really rich experience. And I wanted the audience to share that same trajectory, starting with me and my dad. The daughter-father relationship makes it more universal…

KOOZ It is also mirrored by the family that we see at the end, as surviving tenants of the destroyed building. There are so many metaphors and parallels in the film, from a parent and child relationship to a nation-citizen relationship. What are some of the reactions you receive?

DZ There are so many metaphors in the films that I can see, and then when I screen the film, people mention symbolisms and metaphors that I hadn’t noticed, maybe they were subconscious.

There’s a scene with a girl at the beach, when I talk about my relationship with my father, and water on her skin, the reflections of the water, some people saw that as the ‘skin of glass’. Many metaphors go beyond the ones I intended. But all the elements of the film are evocative and powerful: the images of glass and the ocean convey the idea of life, broken relationships and transparency in relation to the building.

KOOZ A connection in terms of great fragility, of life and in relationships as well as the building. A last question, Denise. Would you say that your films are more about places or people? And what happens next with this one?

DZ You know, places are important for people; we need a place, we're in a place, perhaps you belong to a place. But ultimately I think it's about people — how people occupy a place.

Considering the future of cities, we know that cities can be more inclusive; we can bring people who have less means to the centre of the city, rather than putting them in the suburbs where they cannot find work.

We're planning a book about my father's work, the journey of the film and occupation movement, with several different writers. I will tell the story of making the film and other friends will be writing about my father's work and legacy, and about the occupation movement in São Paulo.

KOOZ That sounds fantastic; I hope it will be bilingual so we can read it. Thank you so much for your time today Denise, and thank you for making Skin of Glass.

DZ Thank you!

Bio

Denise Zmekhol is an Arab-Brazilian award-winning producer and director of documentary films and media projects. Zmekhol’s documentary films, commercials, and innovative transmedia projects have been recognized for their elegant visual style and deft storytelling. Her documentary Children of the Amazon was supported by ITVS and broadcasted on PBS. She co-produced Digital Journey, an Emmy Award winning PBS series. Zmekhol is the director and producer of Skin of Glass, which received funding from ITVS, the National Endowment for the Arts, IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund, Latino Public Broadcasting and several private foundations.

Shumi Bose is chief editor at KoozArch. She is an educator, curator and editor in the field of architecture and architectural history. Shumi is a Senior Lecturer in architectural history at Central Saint Martins and also teaches at the Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association and the School of Architecture at Syracuse University in London. She has curated widely, including exhibitions at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Institute of British Architects. In 2020 she founded Holdspace, a digital platform for extracurricular discussions in architectural education, and currently serves as trustee for the Architecture Foundation.