Liberada is a gender-nonconforming saint prosecuted by the Portuguese Inquisition; João (played by June João) is the trans actress portraying them in a micro-budget work. In Paula Tomás Marques’ critically thoughtful feature debut Two Times João Liberada (Duas vezes João Liberada, 2025), a film crew seeks to create a biopic of the aforementioned figure, who is a fictionalised creation of the filmmaker crafted from archived documents. As the team is on set, João and the group begins to reckon with how their cis male director wants to portray Liberada, just as he is mysteriously incapacitated. The film enjoyed a world premiere in the 2025 Berlinale’s Perspectives section before heading to New York City’s New Directors/New Films selection; now, it is a part of IndieLisboa’s national competition for its national premiere.
At IndieLisboa, Purple Hour spoke with the writer-director to explore the act of decrystallising history, playing with materiality, and collaborative vulnerability as a foundation of the film.
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One of the themes that seems to underpin your film is the idea of not merely reclaiming history, but also creating it for a specific community because of narrativisation, among other things. What is your relationship to this theme as a filmmaker?
How we write history is stuck in a battle of ownership: who tells the story and who doesn’t, and who wins that battle or not. Of course, that has to do with institutions with power and how they manage to beat [others] to write the history they want and that they need to maintain that power. And I think that history is much is much messier [than it seems]. History is also the lives of people on the micro level; it’s not only on the macro level. For me, the writing of history has to be messier—it has to encounter this impossibility of crystallisation. The film wanted to also talk about the impossibility of crystallisation of an identity, of a story, of a people and of history in general.
I started this research by trying to find queer people in the past. It was at the beginning of my transition, when I started to understand myself as a trans person; that was way back. I started to research this because it was a way of exercising that need for legitimisation and of understanding that our existence [as trans people] is not only contemporary. It has history, and it has stories, not only “History” with a big H. It was kind of a personal need to do that research at the time. In the path of trying to do the film, the first step was writing a history based on Inquisitorial documents and on the trials of gender dissidents. The first attempt was writing the story of a fictional character who would mix different information about different trials. That was the time when I called June [June João, who plays João] to be a part of this. I wanted her opinion, because we had similar thoughts about these ideas, and we both didn’t feel that it was really interesting to just do a biopic or a film about a person, because it wouldn’t be the way we wanted to talk about it.
Could you talk a bit more about the collaborative process that you wanted to foster?
I’ve done the same in past films, but this time, I was thinking more about the process of working with and inviting a team to work with me, Cristiana [Cruz Forte, the producer] and June. It had to be a process of finding people that related to the stories we wanted to tell: people that, in some way, could relate to the stories we wanted to tell — mainly queer people. The way we did this was we invited people to talk about our ideas and for them to share what they thought about our ideas and how they connected with them [or not]. I think choosing a team is one of the most challenging parts of making a film, because if you don’t have a team that works well together and understands each other, it’s really difficult to have good teamwork, to feel that people are connected with the film and with each other. This was also because of the fact that we wanted the team to participate in the film by also directly appearing in front of the camera. That was actually one of the most important things of thinking about representation in the film: [the act of] being portrayed and also being portrayed themselves. When we do this exercise of messing with that dynamic in the film – for instance, I appeared in front of the camera, and the crew appeared in front of the camera – it was a mix of who was being filmed and who was filming. I think that it changes the vulnerability dynamic [of a film shoot]. That was one of the most beautiful things about working with all these people. It was this possibility of sharing vulnerability in a different way. This exercise allows that to happen. It’s not just one group of actors in front of the camera being vulnerable for the rest of the crew.
I’d love to hear more about the materiality of the film, which is a very prominent aspect of the film, from the film stock itself to the engraving-style animations and still photos.
We really wanted to shoot a film on 16 mm, because there’s something about the materiality and the idea of the archive that comes along with [celluloid]. We wanted to connect with the idea of having something physical. We could have the film itself printed, and we could touch those images, and we could have access to an archive of how this was made, and how all of us were talking about and thinking about history — all of that being in an archival, physical sense. It made sense for us to mix [historical periods] in a medium, which is not necessarily seen as a “contemporary” medium. We were, in a way, already archiving our stories when shooting on film.
Then for the rest of the mediums: since the beginning, there was a time that we thought, let’s do a “making-of” at the same time. We didn’t have much time for that — we would have needed another team shooting the making-of film. We managed to have another way of doing that by using video-assist images that were recorded on set while we were shooting the shots or preparing a shot. I knew that I wanted the engravings and the illustrations — that was the thing that I knew I had to work on and find a way to do. I wanted to create this sense of reality of this character, besides it being a fictional character. That medium [of engraving] was a way to work with verisimilitude, playing with notions of reality and fiction. I’m really interested in the limits between fiction and documentary, because I think it also has to do with how we’ve been writing history
It’s a similar problem when we talk about what is really history, and what is “History” controlled by power and institutions. The documentary [form] is also controlled by someone. It has a point of view of a director, of a producer. All of them have points of view and a cultural context. I’m interested in trying to destroy that barrier, in the sense that people have to do the exercise of thinking, “This could be real, and this could be fiction.” Suddenly you open the possibility that what you see can be an invention or can be real. I think that we could have the same attitude with reading history books – for example, school manuals. When we are taught in school with textbooks and [teaching] manuals written by the state or by other institutions of how to figure out history and all of what happened in your country, history is dealt with as a fact book. But that’s what I was saying, that history is much messier than this.
Over the course of the film-within-the-film, the director is mysteriously paralysed, which leads to the reclamation of the film by the collaborators. There’s a bit of a mystic quality to it, as if some force is slowly leading him into this condition. Why did you decide on this device specifically?
There were a lot of versions of the film, and the paralysation was already in other versions before, in different ways. It always had to do with the [ghost of] Liberada being able to, for the first time ever, answer what they’re doing about their image. We wanted to paralyse the director in a way that there would be a gesture of, “Please stop and think about this.” There can be the misconception sometimes that we wanted to have this villain that we wanted to kill. It’s more this idea of, please stop and think before what you do. Actually, Jorge [Jácome], the editor, when we made these tarot cards to distribute [to promote the film], he asked me, “If people ask you, what is the meaning of that card, what are you going to say? I said something like, “Well, maybe it means [that you should] look at yourself before talking about others.”
There’s something very symbolic about it – he could have just disappeared, for instance, but this idea very much stuck with me.
It’s the idea of suspending something. People are obliged to think when they are stopped by other means. When you’re shooting and suddenly something happens and you have to change your shots, you have to think creatively about what’s happening around you and what wasn’t working and what can be better, even with that problem that came along. It’s also about how you deal with the suspension, with the unpredictability when you’re working on a film, of reflecting a little bit more on some ideas.
Because we’re talking about paralysation and unpredictability, I was thinking about electricity, too. Aesthetically thinking, there’s another thing that I like when shooting with film. There are these kinds of unpredictable things that happen when you’re shooting with film, and especially when you’re working with fewer funds. New surprises in your film come from the development of the film. There are these kind of flashes between shots sometimes. That was one of the aesthetically formative ideas of the film: these ideas of shocks that the film itself had. That was the way of also finding and constructing an aesthetic side of the electricity in the film. In previous films, I already encountered this thing with film, especially shooting with a Bolex [film camera]. The medium itself is kind of alive in the narrative and in the story. That’s also another thing that is important in terms of connecting it all: aesthetically, narratively, everything.
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Two Times João Liberada screened at IndieLisboa on Saturday, 3 May, and Monday, 5 May.
