The great Ingmar Bergman once observed: “No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.” His words continue to resonate today, carried by the evocative waters of the Venetian Lagoon towards the island of San Servolo, where, from September 10 to 12, the ONA Short Film Festival once again takes shape.  At its core lies a belief in cinema as the ideal medium through which to convey messages that originate in sporting culture before transcending sport itself and reaching towards something deeper. Something capable, indeed, of touching the conscience, stirring emotion and reaching those hidden chambers of the soul. Of teaching us to open our perspectives towards other corners of the world, other communities and other individuals.

As has now become a tradition, we accompany this meaningful gathering with a dedicated editorial series. At the heart of this focus are filmmaker Jean-Marc Joseph aka Superjeanmarc and his short film, ‘Altinha’.

As always, we like to begin with something we consider fundamental to every person we interview, just as it is to every filmmaker taking part in the ONA Short Film Festival: from childhood to the present day, what kind of relationship have you developed with the imagery and imagination of sport? In what ways has sport been, and does it continue to be, a source of inspiration in the way you see the world?

Jean-Marc Joseph: “The first person who comes to mind is my father. He was a physical education teacher, but he always taught me something that I think was quite uncommon at the time: he was very much against competition. He taught young children, at primary-school level, and would always try to make them understand that sport was about pleasure rather than competition. That idea stayed with me and, I think, gradually became part of the way I approached sport myself. I remember that when I was a kid, I didn’t actually like football. But there was a certain pressure at school because everyone knew the players and followed the game, and you almost felt like a fool if you didn’t. So you pretended to like it even when you didn’t. At one point, I even asked my parents if I could join a football team, but my father said no. He was also very much against the attitude of parents who seemed to train their children as though they were already preparing them to become professional athletes. He really disagreed with that mentality.

That stayed with me, particularly when I was younger and much more active than I am today. I practised quite a lot of sport, but always within that same perspective. It’s also how I eventually became interested in bikepacking. It is a physical activity, of course, but it has nothing to do with competition. It’s about travelling, and for me it might actually be the best way of travelling that exists. So when I think about my relationship with sport, it has always been much more about enjoyment, and about feeling good in both body and mind, than about performance or competition. And, strangely enough, I had never really connected this idea with my father until you asked me this question. But as I’m talking about it now, I realise that it is exactly what ‘Altinha’ is about. There is no winner and no loser. Within the community itself, there is even a question of whether you can actually call it a sport. Does a sport necessarily need to have a winner? That question is somehow at the heart of it.”

How, on the other hand, did visual storytelling enter your life? What does it represent to you today?

Jean-Marc Joseph: “Like almost everyone, I drew when I was a child. The difference, perhaps, is that most people eventually stop, whereas I never did. I loved comics, and visual narrative was something I was genuinely interested in from a very early age. That eventually led me to graphic design. I studied it without really knowing whether it was what I was meant to do. In a way, it was simply the most rational solution I had found for turning my artistic interests into something that could become a profession: something that allowed me to tell my parents, ‘Look, there are actually people who do this for a living.’ Drawing was already part of my life, so graphic design seemed close enough. But I don’t think I was ever a particularly good graphic designer, at least not as a designer per se. 

I was fortunate, though, to end up working for Base Design, an international design company from Belgium. Through them, I had the opportunity to work on the rebranding of a television channel. Suddenly, I was moving beyond two-dimensional graphic design. There was motion, there was a timeline, there was sound. We were creating all those elements that exist around television programming—the animations before advertising, the weather and so on—and working with After Effects artists to produce them. It was my first real encounter with the audiovisual world, and once that happened, there was no way back. All these other possibilities for storytelling appeared. 

At the same time, I had always documented things quite naturally. In my twenties, when the first MiniDV cameras appeared, I bought a little Sony PC101. It was still tape-based, but small enough to fit inside your jacket pocket. I would carry it around and record things in the street, or take it to a bar and film my friends. Today everybody does that with a phone, but this was before smartphones, even before YouTube, when filming an ordinary moment was much less common. Cameras usually came out for holidays, birthdays or special occasions. I was doing something closer to street photography, but with moving images. Those everyday moments felt much more precious because capturing them was still unusual.

That was really how I fell into filmmaking. Over the years at Base Design, the audiovisual side of what we were doing gradually developed. The television project led to other opportunities; at one point I had the chance to make a music video, and we began thinking that perhaps audiovisual work could become a real part of the company. But it always remained a side activity within a graphic design studio. We couldn’t really compete with production companies whose entire structure was built around filmmaking. Then the 2008 financial crisis arrived and the company decided to concentrate again on graphic design, its core business. 

That was the moment when I realised that if I genuinely wanted to pursue this passion and move towards documentary filmmaking, I couldn’t remain there. I had spent fourteen years with the company, so leaving became a kind of classic midlife crisis. I travelled through South America by bicycle and eventually found myself in Brazil. In fact, that journey is directly connected to how ‘Altinha’ began. I wanted to become a filmmaker, but I didn’t have a filmmaking portfolio. I needed to make something of my own. I had a friend living there who could host me, which meant I had somewhere to stay for free. And that is really where the story of the film begins.”

‘Altinha’ tells the story of a distinctly Carioca tradition. What led you towards a subject capable of bringing together two elements so deeply woven into the Brazilian soul: football and the beach? And through making the film, what did you come to understand about such a singular discipline?

Jean-Marc Joseph: “I live in Barcelona and have many Brazilian friends here. One of them, André, had lived in Rio, and I remember telling him that I wanted to shoot something there, but that I didn’t want to make another documentary about the favelas. It seemed as though so many people who went to Rio with a camera ended up telling that same kind of story. I wanted to look somewhere else. André was actually the one who told me about Altinha. He had played it as a teenager and explained that there was this very particular practice and community on the beach that had received relatively little attention. 

I was immediately fascinated by the paradox of it. In one sense, the gesture is almost universal: people standing in a circle and keeping a football in the air is something children all over the world have probably done at some point. And yet Altinha, as a culture, is extraordinarily specific. You can go to São Paulo and find people who barely know the word, while in Rio there is this particular stretch of Ipanema where the players gather and an entire community has formed around it. That tension was interesting: something extremely local built around football, probably one of the most universal sports in the world. The other thing that immediately struck me was that nobody wins and nobody loses. When you pass the ball to someone, the point is not to make it easy, because there has to be a challenge, but neither do you want to make it impossible, because if the ball touches the ground, everyone loses. There is a kind of shared responsibility in keeping the game alive. 

At the time, I was still inexperienced as a documentary filmmaker, but I already understood that I needed some kind of story. My original idea came from a man my friend knew on Ipanema Beach, a local figure within the Altinha community who wanted to bring it into the Rio Olympics. Not as a competitive sport, but as part of the opening ceremony, as an expression of local culture. I thought it was perfect: this man from the beach was going to bring Altinha into the Olympic Games. I was already imagining the end of the film. Then I arrived in Rio and very quickly realised that although he spent his life on the beach, playing Altinha and talking about the idea, I didn’t think he would actually make it happen. Suddenly, I no longer had the story I thought I was going there to tell.

What I did have, though, was the place itself. There was something almost village-like about the social fabric of that stretch of beach. You would return each day and encounter the same people, the same characters, each occupying their own place within this small ecosystem. There were unwritten rules and ways of behaving that you had to understand before you could really enter it. They told me something very important when I first arrived: ‘Don’t film yet. Just stand here and watch. Understand how it works.’ I was staying for two weeks, and gradually that presence allowed me to understand the place differently. Language was one of the biggest challenges. I had taken a few Portuguese classes before travelling, but it was nowhere near enough, and most of the people I met didn’t speak English. 

More than anything, I became fascinated by the aesthetic of the game itself. The point is to challenge the person receiving the ball while also making the exchange as beautiful and impressive as possible. The ball should travel high; there are tricks, gestures. And the level of skill is extraordinary. Sometimes they can keep the ball alive for minutes without it touching the sand, and it feels incredibly long when you are actually watching it happen. Then you see these fourteen-year-old kids on the beach and it almost feels as if the ball has become part of their body. You find yourself wondering where that level of skill could possibly come from. It barely seems human.”

Throughout the short film, the narrative moves between almost ecstatic moments—in which the ball seems to defy gravity, tracing shapes across the sky—and personal testimonies that explore the deeper meaning of the practice, both individually and socially. Why did you choose to bring the more artistic dimension of Altinha into dialogue with its anthropological one?

Jean-Marc Joseph: “I feel that this dialogue emerged very intuitively. I’m generally someone who overthinks everything, but I don’t think I approached the film in that way. There are two things that were fundamental to what ‘Altinha’ eventually became. The first is that it was essentially a training ground for me, almost a boot camp for learning how to make documentaries. The second, which is closely connected to that, is that it was entirely self-produced. There was no client and there were no constraints. That can sometimes be problematic, because I actually think creativity often arises from constraints: when you have too many possibilities, you can end up doing nothing. But in this case, it also gave me an extraordinary sense of freedom. 

My own idea of what makes a good documentary has always involved two things. First, you have to enter into people’s lives. Ultimately, the film is about people. It isn’t really about the sport. Sport is the doorway that allows you to reach something else. At the same time, if you are telling a story through film, you want to make it visually compelling. It is a visual medium, after all. Of course, ‘Altinha’ still contains talking heads and observational material, but I wanted the more dreamlike and poetic sequences to translate something of what people were telling me: how they felt about Altinha, but also how the practice itself felt to me when I encountered it. 

That probably goes back to your earlier question about my first impression of the game. Those low-angle shots looking upwards, with the ball suspended in slow motion against the sky, came from that sensation. They weren’t conceived through some theoretical, top-down approach. It was almost the opposite: the visual language emerged from what I was seeing and feeling there. I obviously couldn’t know exactly what it felt like physically to play at their level, but those images became my way of trying to translate that sensation. 

There is also something else that makes this conversation particularly meaningful to me. I was genuinely surprised when ONA reached out about a film I made ten years ago. I remember thinking, ‘I wish this had happened ten years ago.’ Then I looked into your magazine, and one of the first things I read was this idea that what you publish should still be capable of conveying the same emotions ten years later. I really appreciated that. I thought it was amazing, because somehow that is exactly what is happening to ‘Altinha’ now.”

Your ‘Altinha’ will be screened on San Servolo before the ONA audience. What feelings arise when you imagine your work taking shape in such a singular setting, surrounded by the Venetian Lagoon? And what would you ultimately like the ONA audience to carry with them after experiencing the film?

Jean-Marc Joseph: “Of course, I’m incredibly excited and honoured to have the film at ONA. I didn’t know the festival before they contacted me, and today, with the proliferation of festivals everywhere, you encounter both good and bad. So I was genuinely happy to discover the level of care behind ONA: the curation, the taste, everything surrounding the festival. Even when they told me that your magazine would contact me, I didn’t know Athleta Mag. But what I perhaps appreciate most is the willingness to say, ‘I like this film. I don’t care whether it was made in 2017; it still has something to say.’ 

I think our contemporary culture has developed an almost obsessive relationship with novelty. Something appears and, almost before it has properly arrived, it already belongs to the past. Everything becomes disposable, regardless of its value or how much time someone invested in making it. You can spend seven years creating something and then, three months after its release, somehow it is already over. So choosing to screen a film almost ten years later feels like a statement to me. It is a small but meaningful act of resistance. 

As for what I would like the audience to carry with them, I think I would go all the way back to my father. Sport doesn’t need a winner in order to have value. It doesn’t necessarily need a time, a result or a performance. I think the practice of Altinha itself carries something increasingly meaningful within a society obsessed with performance, monetary value and measurable results. There is a French astro-physicist, philosopher and poet (Aurélien Barrau) whose thinking I admire, that approaches these questions in his lectures. When he speaks about ecology, the environment and the direction humanity is taking, he often returns to a very simple question: where do our values lie? What do we really want? What does it actually mean to be rich? That is exactly what the Altinha player ‘PXE’ says towards the end of the film: he has no money, but he is very rich. 

There are forms of richness that have nothing to do with what can be bought, produced or monetised. Perhaps that is what I would ultimately like people to take from the film. I hope it helps people reflect on how to build a new society that allows everyone to do something simply because it feels good: not because it will make you money, bring you fame or produce some measurable result. Sometimes that can be enough.”