Portuguese documentary filmmaker Susana de Sousa Dias, who is the guest of honor at IDFA, spoke to the festival’s artistic director Isabel Arrate Fernandez this week about how she set out to interrogate the repressive methods of her country’s fascist regime through an examination of its archives and footage from the period.

De Sousa Dias, who was inspired to become a filmmaker by the masters of Italian neorealism such as Luchino Visconti, first became interested in re-examining historical subjects by delving into archives when she was asked to direct an episode of a series on Portuguese cinema.

Her episode was on the period 1930 to 1945, during which fascism tightened its grip on Portugal, the start of a four-decade long reign of terror, presided over by António de Oliveira Salazar.

Following that, she came across the case of two Portuguese nurses who were jailed for protesting against a law barring nurses from getting married. She decided to make her first film, 2000’s “Criminal Case 141/53,” about the nurses, one of whom endured frequent beatings and solitary confinement.

This led her to dive deeper into the archives left behind by the fascist regime, and specifically into the records of the political police, an archive that she says is extensive.

This, in turn, led to her feature “Still Life,” released in 2005, which is based on news reports, propaganda films and images from prison archives, and “48” in 2009, which juxtaposes the regime’s photographs of political prisoners with testimonies decades later, revealing the violence they were subjected to.

She commented that it was her discovery of albums of photographs of imprisoned political prisoners that drove her to make “Still Life.” “It made a huge impression on me, which I could not verbalize,” she said. But she was also conscious that there was so much that was missing – the cruel stories behind the photographs. That is what she sought to uncover.

“If you go to the political police archive, you don’t see any reference to torture. You see the reports on the interrogations of the prisoners, but they don’t tell you that, meanwhile, they tortured them,” she said. “My films, in a certain way, are trying to fill some of these gaps.”

She added that the police archives turned her view of the world upside down. “It changed completely my perspective on life, my perspective on history, everything. It’s a very disturbing experience being inside the [police and military] archives,” she said.

Nonetheless, she decided to only use images from the police and military archives and archive footage produced under the control of the dictatorship.

This posed a dilemma for the director in that these photographs and footage were shot from the perspective of the dictatorship. “I wanted to show the other side of the dictatorship, and this obliged me to undertake deep research into the interior of the images,” she said.

All of this was done in the editing, which she did herself on a Moviola, focusing on certain areas of the image and omitting others. She found herself looking for “something in the image that had escaped the message that the regime wanted to convey,” she said. These details in the images are what she calls “a montage within the shots.” She referred to an image as an “active entity” to be examined for meaning, asking, “What does an image do? And what does an image do to us?”

The film’s sound effects and music, which was composed by her brother, António de Sousa Dias, helped her compose the images, and both the composition of the music and the editing process progressed hand-in-hand.

“When I started editing, I didn’t even know where I could start from,” she said. “But when I heard this music, click, the whole film appeared in my mind. It was the concept: I’m going to organize the film like it is an exhibition, with different rooms.” These would include “the rooms for the colonies, the rooms of war, the rooms of the church,” and so on.

As time passed, the Portuguese authorities in charge of the archives made it more difficult for De Sousa Dias to access them by insisting on authorization being given by those in the photos through a process she called “Kafkaesque.” But still she found ways to do so, she explained, without giving away her methods, although she quoted Werner Herzog, who said filmmakers need “good criminal energy” to make films.

However, when she contacted the former inmates, she found they could also give her the backstory to their prison mugshots. That led to another realization. “Maybe I can enter into the images to see what we cannot see: what happened inside the prisons, traces of torture,” she said. This led to her next film “48,” fuelled by a simple idea: mugshots and people talking about the mugshots.

Although she had the testimonies of the former prisoners typed out, at some point she threw them away, she explained, and worked directly with the recordings and the images, “editing the film through listening,” she said. What was important, she found, was not just what was said, but the way it was said, complete with pauses. She said that the way she edited the testimonies have been compared to a Japanese haiku.