Introduction

Five people are willing to confront their phobias. Blood. Airplane. Darkness. Flowers. Colors. It is a film about fear by a personal and intimate perspective.

Synopsis

Five people are willing to confront their phobias and agree to meet Jean Pierre – a Frenchman that lives in Brazil – in this challenge. “Filmphobia” comprises five different episodes that have in common the presence of Jean Pierre, the films leading character, who will be dealing with phobic characters along the episodes. A singular fact: in each of the situations, Jean Pierre presents himself as a different job and with a different motivation to propose a challenge to each one of the phobic characters. The best form to present this film is to describe briefly the 5 situations:

Encounter Situation - Number 1 - Blood

Person with phobia of blood meets Jean Pierre, who introduces himself as a psychoanalyst. They talk nervously about blood phobia and. In the end, Jean Pierre shows the person a sequence of images with bodies bleeding. The phobic character faints.

Encounter Situation – Number 2 – Airplane

A man with airplane phobia agrees to talk with Jean Pierre, who introduces himself as a lawyer of an airplane pilot that was fired because he could not fly anymore. Jean Pierre challenges the phobic character to enter in a gadget (a precarious flight simulator) and to hold there for a few minutes. The phobic character triumphs the challenge.

Encounter Situation –Number 3 – Darkness

A person with fear of the dark receives Jean Pierre in his home. Here, the main character says that he is a pharmaceutical representative that wants to test new antiphobia drugs. The challenge of the darkness will be only heard. With an entirely black screen, we can only hear the screams that suddenly stop.

Encounter Situation –Number 4 – Flowers

The character phobic of flowers (phobia much more common then we think) meets with Jean Pierre, now as neurologist that is making experiences with unexplored parts of the brain. Jean Pierre here reveals that he abandoned the surgeries because he feared to accidentally kill patients in the middle of the surgery. Phobia of the impulse of cutting arteries. Jean Pierre reveals an inclination to neo-Nazism and that he is preparing a self-help book.

Encounter Situation –Number 5 - Colors

The phobia of colors will be explored in this episode. Some people cannot deal with colors, even with the color White. Jean Pierre here says he is a documentary maker. All the film crew, including sound capture, appears in the scene. Jean Pierre shows to the phobic character a situation of absolute white. He sweats, until he disappears in the scene.

Ending the film

Jean Pierre walks alone in direction of a mountain, when he sees the edge ahead, he stops. The camera shows the main character in a limit situation. The final cut happens, but we do not know if he committed suicide or stayed still because of his fear of impulsion. It is an open end: who is Jean Pierre? Why he proposed such challenges? These answers don’t matter here. Using moments of extreme silence (extended time, contemplation, and calm) and verbose situations (ruptures), FilmPhobia wants to deal with fear (macro) and intimacy (micro).

The movie will be structured as a making of of a documentary feature. Important: the documentary never existed. Anyway, the documentary is “invented” here as a striking experience in Brazilian audiovisual history, an audience hit. A fake documentary (Faces of Phobias) inside the fiction (FilmPhobia). FilmPhobia shows Jean Pierre’s experience with people who agreed to challenge their phobias. The success with critics and public is attributed to the sensationalist exploitation of human weakness. Jean Pierre explored the limits of the psyche, exposing people with phobias to emotionally violent situations. The fiction movie is based on allegations, secret revelations, and accusations about Jean Pierre’s ethics. In addition, it approaches an important current issue: the fear and the authoritarian relations deriving from fear control. Here, the logic of metacinema and the relationship between documentary and fiction are explored to the limit. It also discusses contemporary issues related to making documentaries, such as paying or not interviewees, the logic of authorship, the ethics of documenting, and the relationship between characters and the real world. The closing sequence brings Jean Pierre (Jean Claude Bernardet) and Kiko Goifman, sitting face to face. Here, a new revelation takes place: the sensationalist making of was part of the original project. More than in the (previously agreed) accusations present in the making of, Jean Pierre was interested in making a movie that would discuss ethics, fear, sensationalism, chain of intrigues, and over exposure. About the language: simplicity, no special effects, the camera will sometimes seem unstable (FilmPhobia) and sometimes steady (Faces of Phobias). We will also keep an alternate game between extremely wordy and silent situations. And the main point: the film will not long for beauty at all.

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