Sylvain Verdet talks about his choices for shooting Camila Beltrán’s "Mi bestia"

Bogotá, 1996. The population is scared : the devil will arrive during an imminent lunar eclipse. Mila, aged 13, feels the gaze of others on her becoming more oppressive. She wonders if the metamorphosis of her body is related to this prophecy. The dreaded day arrives, the red moon illuminates the sky.

By choosing to shoot in the very places where she grew up in Bogotá, Camila Beltrán grounds her debut feature in her memories of this pivotal period from childhood to adolescence. Sylvain Verdet explains : “It was very important for her to revisit the places of her personal history, from the school that opens the film (an authentic location where she spent part of her schooling), to the set design of the house inspired by her own childhood home. Each location was carefully chosen, drawing from her own experiences. Even the car used by the character David, the stepfather who picks her up from school, is a model from her childhood memories”.

Discussing the stylistic influences guiding their approach to framing and camera work, Sylvain Verdet readily cites Roman Polanski’s 1965 film Repulsion. "We were intrigued by this portrayal of a solitary young girl and especially by the way it adopts her unique point of view... Camila is a director who puts a great deal of trust in her team. She doesn’t really impose a style, she listens a lot to her collaborators, and quickly communicates what she likes and doesn’t like. Then she just goes for it, and it’s a pleasure to work like that. On Mi Bestia, the handheld camera, very close to the character and the almost exclusive use of medium or short focal lengths (24 and 32mm on the Alexa Mini) was inspired by this Polanski film. This results in a very particular framing style, with the camera being guided by the character in an almost ’approximate’ manner. A short focal length that encompasses a little of everything, not very precise, drawing the viewer into the character’s bubble. We don’t frame thinking about the edge of the frame or the off-screen, we simply position ourselves inside this bubble. In Repulsion, for example, I remember all those shots in the street, when Catherine Deneuve is walking and the camera follows her, slightly too close to her...".

While Mi Bestia is truly innovative in its framing, viewers are particularly struck by its experiments in rendering movement. Reflecting on his first collaboration with the director on the previous short film, Sylvain Verdet recounts their shared explorations in this area :
"On Pacifico Obscuro, Camila was already telling the story of the mysterious disappearance of a group of three young girls, also playing with the codes of fairy tales and fantasy. It was on that first film that we experimented with variations in shooting speed to achieve a different narrative style. This is not a new technique, already used in 1994 by Wong Kar-waï, notably in Chungkin Express.
Building on this research from the short film, we decided to systematically implement it in the feature, shooting Mi Bestia in its entirety at rates ranging from 16 to 12 fps, while increasing the shutter aperture. The exposure time increases, creating that characteristic motion blur. The 24 frames per second rate is then restored with a simple click in Resolve during the creation of the Proxies. This effect distorts the perception of movement and thus the perception of time. In my opinion, this has a direct impact on credibility. What do we believe, for example, about what the scene is showing ? And not just in the moving shots. We found it all the more interesting in the static shots, with a character displaying a rather composed attitude. In the end, it creates a different rhythm for the film...".

When asked about implementing this technique in the film’s opening sequence, the cinematographer confides : “It’s true that in the opening sequence, with the young girls in the Catholic school, we decided to approach it gradually, so as not to rush things too much. A way to guide the viewers gently and getting them used to this unusual temporal rendering. To do this, Mickael Commereuc, the film’s colourist, introduced us to a number of functions in DaVinci Resolve (snap to frame or optical flow), which helped us either accentuate or smooth out the effect, depending on the scale of the shots, the movement and the reading we could have of the scene”.

Although the film primarily revolves around the character of Mila, a scene in the first third of the film introduces us to a second female character, Dora, the housekeeper responsible for looking after the young girl when her mother returns late from work. A young woman in her twenties, she becomes our protagonist’s confidante during a long confession scene. Sylvain Verdet explains : "This is a fundamental sequence in the origin of the project, based on the encounter Camila had with her two non-professional actresses. It’s a slightly timeless moment in the film, and also on the set, because this long confession by Dora (Majerly Murillo) is in fact a purely documentary scene, where everything said is true.
It was a very powerful scene that forged bonds, going far beyond the usual on-set relationship between the director and her actors.
To shoot this scene, extensive preparation was needed before Majerly agreed to tell us her own story. It’s at the exact crossroads between fiction and documentary, in a scene that represents Camila’s work very well. A work that mixes at the heart of its cast only a few established actors (the stepfather or the mother) and non-professionals. This scene was shot in a purely documentary spirit on my part, with absolute discretion of the technical means. The camera, the crew, the lights... everything had to disappear. And remain available so that when the time came, we could start shooting and capture the scene in a single take. The reverse shot of Mila is done after the fact, from what was captured during the confession. It was without doubt the most challenging sequence of the film for me, and also the most moving on set.”

Among other peculiarities of the film is the low camera angle, which gives a recurring low-angle perspective in many scenes. Sylvain Verdet explains this choice :
"Creating a bit of an angle in the film was part of the initial decisions. Either a little above or a little below, in any case not necessarily at the same level. Since the shoot was done with a very small crew, I agreed to shoot the film without a camera assistant – except from an intern form France who was very helpful, but who wasn’t focus puller - and I quickly developed a framing technique myself, with the camera at the level of my stomach, framing with the help of a small monitor like you might do with the viewfinder of a Rolleiflex camera in photography.
This arrangement, shared with the traditional hand-held camera, allowed me to avoid constantly shooting from a high-angle on the young actress, who was shorter than me. It also allowed me to work on the low-angle shots that are a regular feature of the film. Another advantage was using Cooke S3 lenses, which are very compact and have an extremely reduced focal length, allowing focusing with just two fingers under the lens. This configuration, again, is close to documentary style, but when combined with these changes in frame rate and sometimes simple fixed-point focus in scenes, it gives the image its personality”.

Other key moments frequently found in the film include the protagonist’s wandering through a sort of jungle near the city, foreshadowing the transition to the fantastical dimension. “These highly protected ecosystems are one of the special features of the city of Bogotá," explains the cinematographer. Over there they’re called Humedal. Whether on the outskirts or sometimes right in the middle of a very urban area, you can come across these mini-forests, very dense and very dark. These areas were already present during Camila’s childhood, and here again she wanted to incorporate them as a memory into her film. In these scenes, we used 100% natural light, with no artificial sources. It’s a sort of dirty jungle, with a layer of grime on the leaves, almost dusty in the image. The greens are very muted, there isn’t much colour saturation”.

Sylvain Verdet admits to having had a lot of fun making this film. "Camila Beltrán and I share a passion for ’artisanal’ filmmaking... favouring small teams, simple technical equipment, greater attention to reality and what happens on set... a form of availability and improvisation... perhaps not a bit less precise in the preparation... but held together thanks to their intensity. And that’s exactly what Camila proposes in her way of weaving together fiction and reality. With this marked subject, where the presence of the eclipse and of the devil inevitably refers to a highly scripted cinema. And, at the same time, a reality specific to documentary embodied by these two young girls. The edit helped hold things together, creating a richness in the final script... "

(Interview by François Reumont for the AFC)