PÖFF 2025: 18 Holes to Paradise | Interview with João Nuno Pinto

João Nuno Pinto’s exciting and extravagant look at the decline of a family and society as a whole impresses with intricate characters and satisfying storytelling. The atmosphere of the film continuously pulls back into the past so that at times it feels like being in a classical novel with very contemporary consequences. 18 Holes to Paradise is part of the main competition at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival and we had a chance to speak to the director about his third feature.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: I’m really looking forward to talk to you about your beautiful movie, 18 Holes to Paradise. How did the themes of this movie inspire you and why are the themes you included important to you?

João Nuno Pinto: I think that the themes are of this moment that the world is going through. Not just now, because it has been building up for a while now. It seems like we are heading to the edge, to this collapse of society, not just as an environmental issue, society, as a whole. It’s something that we’ve all witnessed happening for a while. And this theme of the world collapsing, the clashes in society and how the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. And there’s nothing changing.

We aren’t changing anything. We are just in a mode of surviving as individuals thinking about ourselves. How can I survive in this madness? So these issues have been in my head for a long time and growing and the film came up when me and Fernanda, who is the scriptwriter, and also my wife, my partner in life. She also wrote Mosquito, my previous film, so we worked together.

During Covid times, we moved to Alentejo, to this region where the film is set. And it was the best thing that happened to us and to our family was to move there, to this beautiful region. We moved to a caravan; we didn’t have a house. We just tried to figure out how we could take our kids and to the countryside and be away from the city and give them this freedom and nature and everything to our kids. And so, we moved to Alentejo and we stayed there.

It was supposed to be just for the quarantine. And it was okay to live in a caravan during the lockdown. But we just loved being there and we stayed there for three years living in this caravan. And while we were there, we witnessed how climate changed, severe summers, how the lack of water was impacting local communities. And at the same time, we saw all these big properties being sold to these hedge funds and to these rich foreigners that had money to buy these places and to build hotels and golf courses. We saw people who didn’t have water to feed the animals, but at the same time, the water was being used for golf courses. And so, all these were themes that we said, okay, that’s what we’re going to talk about in our next film.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: You really succeeded because I recognize all of the themes you mentioned in the film, but they are not forced on you. You just notice them on the sidelines which is the most important thing to really believe the story.

This film, when it starts, it reminds me a little bit of Call Me By Your Name. It’s an idyllic setting, you’re always having family lunches and swimming and so on. But the atmosphere changes very fast. And it’s completely different. This family is bitter and dysfunctional and sometimes aggressive compared to this ideal place where they are located. Why is this setting important?

João Nuno Pinto: In the film and we wanted to talk about all of the problems present in the world through the family. And you have two families and the conflict between them. But the family concept, it was very dear to me and Fernanda. Fernanda grew up in this old, big property in Brazil, so she has many memories of these lunches on the porch, of the swimming pool, all this comes from her own backstory. And for me also, the family is central to my own life and existence. I grew up having big family reunions, so for us this memory of the idyllic summer with all the family in the house resonates in our own lives and memories as when we were children.

We don’t come from the same background of these people, so it was our vision to setup this nice, idyllic place and idyllic memories of the old days, of a time that doesn’t exist anymore. But we try to maintain those memories. And it’s important also because that is the main conflict between Francisca and Katarina from the two sisters because Francisca still wants to hold to those memories which is why she doesn’t want to sell the house and for Katarina it’s the opposite. She wants to put away those memories. So, it leads to where we wanted to go to the film about how you can have different perspectives of the same issue.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: It’s interesting the way you interpreted Francesca because to me she also wants to hold on to the legacy, the status of what the property gives her. But you’re right, also the nostalgia and the memories, while her sister is more concerned with how much status and importance money can bring her. And then Susanna is also connected to the property as well. To her, it’s a way of surviving, especially for her mother, because she can’t afford somewhere for her mom to live.

João Nuno Pinto: For us, it was really interesting to approach this story because the selling of the property is just an excuse for us to to make a broader reflection about all these problematics.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: To include a bit of conflict.

João Nuno Pinto: Francisca is the artist of the family. She has an artistic soul. She has a more sensitive, more nostalgic, more romantic vision of the whole thing. And we can relate to that. So, as a character, we can relate to that part of her argument. She shouldn’t sell this because this is her legacy. This is everything her father’s built. You’d want your children to live there to give them also the freedom and the privilege of having this space. But at the same time, Francisca is in denial of everything that is happening and she’s a bit narcissist also. She’s too focused on herself and her suffering and her misery, but you can understand also that she doesn’t have anything else. If you take that property from her, she will die, her soul will die because she doesn’t have anything else. Her son doesn’t talk to her, she’s alone. She’s a woman alone in that place.

Katarina, she doesn’t live there, so you can see that she has run away from all that pretty soon and she is more pragmatic. She’s a journalist, she’s a writer, she’s very informed, and she knows that that place is going to die, it’s going to dry, and it’s very expensive to maintain that, and they don’t have that money anymore. They used to have it when their father was alive, but not anymore. She wants to sell it because she needs the money. So, each one has their own reasons that you can relate to. 

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: And then you have a broader thing issue here, which is about the people that work there their whole lives and that they don’t have the luxury of either romanticizing the past or using that property to invest in their future.

João Nuno Pinto: Exactly. They don’t have a voice. They don’t have an agenda. And that is the thing is like, Susanna represents she comes there. She comes because she knows that the property is to be sold and her mother has dementia and it’s only getting worse. And these people don’t they don’t care about them. I love this phrase that she’s like family. But in the end, it’s like, you’re almost like family, but you are not family so I’m going to take care of mine.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: We can refer to that point actually. That’s one of the most powerful scenes in the movie when Susanna talks to Lorenco in the car and at first he is offended. He says, of course you people want to talk about money. And then later he thinks he’s being generous in offering to pay €20,000 for her pension and that can’t help them survive. This is a phrase that’s used in corporate language a lot in a way to pretend to care while reducing a person, leaving them to struggle and to drown, really.

João Nuno Pinto: Because that’s what’s happening in the world, we don’t care. There’s no empathy for others. We could easily be a more just society. And because money talks and everything is going to a few billionaires when the majority of people can’t even afford to have a house. What’s happening in Portugal is absurd and I think this is happening everywhere, but here people can’t afford to have a house anymore because it’s too expensive. You can’t afford to rent anymore. And that’s what Susana said, I don’t know what I’m going to do and these guys are talking about millions that they will get with the sale of this land and this woman that worked there her whole life won’t get anything.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: She doesn’t even get the day off. They notice that she has dementia, but it’s irrelevant. She can still help us out and do what we are used to her doing.

João Nuno Pinto: Let’s keep her busy, yes. We wanted to address all these issues and in the end, the film talks much more about this social injustice. But how it leads to it is not obvious. We didn’t want to make anything obvious in the film. We didn’t want that any of the problematics that the film addresses became the flagship of the film 

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: Well, think you succeeded in making these issues very understandable, even though there was not like a big talk or a protest or anything like that. But still, you really managed to set it up to be clear. And I believe it is what you said because of your own experiences or your wife’s experiences in a similar setting and then of course being politically engaged where you could understand how it actually creeps up in everyday life and that’s really what made it powerful. 

I’d like to talk to you a little bit about the artistry in the film. I found the choice of music very interesting. At times I felt like I was in an arcade game and the towards the end it became like a tense thriller, like someone was going to get murdered. What did you want to achieve with the choice of music?

João Nuno Pinto: First of all, I didn’t want to make an obvious choice of music, make it melodramatic or go with a cello, something that would become like the normal code, cinematically speaking. Because we had this co-production with Italy I wanted to work with the Italian composer because I really think Italians have a history with composing film scores and I though it would be really nice to discover someone who could do something different.

And they were proposing composers and composers and I didn’t like anyone because they all sounded very proper. Like what you expected to hear. Very good, very professional, very, very good, but very proper. They didn’t give me this new gut feeling that I wanted the film to have. And then someone had seen Ginevra in concert and she has this electronic style and she studied electronic music and she was making her first steps in scoring films. She’s very young, only 30 years old when she started doing this film. And when I heard her music, I was like, okay, I can feel it’s her. Her music was very atmospheric.

When I shoot, I always have music for the film. I have music for the characters. I have music for the scenes. I direct with music in my head. I like to direct like it’s a partiture. So the first thing was to detach from the music I had in mind and start with a white sheet. I didn’t want to expose her to my previous ideas. I wanted her to have total freedom to find her own voice in the film and not do my voice through her method. For me, that was clear.

And we talked a lot and then we wanted to have this clock ticking, and that the beat of the clock that doesn’t stop. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. It doesn’t stop and the world doesn’t stop. We are walking to the edge of existence and it doesn’t stop.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: Yeah, exactly. That’s what I thought was like the arcade game or even like social media. Always clink, clink, clink, clink, clink, clink, like a casino. But your idea is even scarier.

Yes. And then we decided to have a lot of animals in the film. To have nature there. You have humans acting all crazy and you have the animals and you have an animal that’s very constant during the film, which is the cow. So, the cows are watching and they’re thinking how can you be all so stupid? That’s how we decided that the cow was the narrator of our film. And so the music is the voice of the cow in a certain way. This was very conceptual thinking. It’s not literal, it’s not translated literally in music. But that was our starting point. Let’s do music like it’s the cow that is talking about what is she is seeing. And you have the clock that doesn’t stop. And then it was just Ginevra spreading wings of her talent and of her expression.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: I love this interpretation.

Can you tell me a little about the visual choices? I might have missed it, but what was the reasoning behind the way the title looks?

João Nuno Pinto: OK, well, the theme is very serious, but the film also has irony and sarcasm throughout. And we try to have always this gaze of irony through the film. And we wanted that the title also reflects this irony, so as not to be totally serious. t’s like the cow is giving the title, that’s the point. These people are really funny. You have to laugh at them.

That’s a thing we can’t forget. Because the film has those moments where you laugh like when they arrive with the water and the water smells like shit and they don’t know what to do because they are clumsy and they’re not prepared.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: You feel like laughing and crying at the same time. 

And please tell me about the wallpaper in one of the final scenes when all of the people come in for shelter. Is it an actual art piece or was it inspired just for the purpose of the story?

João Nuno Pinto: It gives context to the story and the scene mimics it, so it’s quite important. We have this very Eurocentric vision of the world and we feel that some people feel more entitled than others. And we live in this moment where we blame the chaos that the world on the immigrants, for instance. And Lorenco says says at one point, it must be the immigrants, he blames the immigrants. And the wallpaper gives us context that these people have money because back in the past they colonized and they enslaved and they have big plantations in Angola, in Brazil and all these colonies. That’s where the big money came to Portugal from. So, all these people who say we are these very old families with money all this money came from 200 years ago or 100 years ago came from the colonies from exploiting other people.

So this gives the context where we always been like a f*cked up society. It’s not just now. We just continue. Having slaves is not proper anymore, but having very cheap immigrant labour is okay. Because it makes the economy work for some. The economy isn’t working. It keeps going. It’s working for some. And this predatory mindset of exploring, of killing, it just continues. And you see in that wallpaper, in a very natural way, it is the same like it was 200 years ago.

And in the end, you can see that the same people, even those who say they are very aware, they just want to survive first. Because in the end, we are all in the same room. We are all in the same boat. We are all in the same place. We are all going to hell altogether. It doesn’t matter if you are rich or poor.

A beautiful thing about that wallpaper and that room is that life sometimes can be more powerful than fiction… Life is more powerful than fiction, always, When we were looking for this property for the shoot we wanted this house to be beautiful but decayed, cared for but at the same time abandoned, but at the same time you know the grass is still mown and everything and then I found this house and this house it was exactly how it was written in the script and the story of this house was the same and this was about to become a hotel also so we had to shoot before it was transformed in hotel and it belonged to a big family, old family. And the father was dead, the heirs were the same age as our protagonist. He had properties in Angola. So he had that room with this wallpaper. And we were like… Okay, this is our film. It’s here. It is in this room. So we’re going to show this room in a very important moment of the film because this encapsulates everything that we want to say. And so it was a happy coincidence that we found it. And I think that the creative process of doing a film, you have to be open to what the universe gives you.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: Finally, a little bit of a lighter question. This is only your third feature film, right? But you have this long career of looking through the lens, whether it’s through advertising, I saw you were an amateur photographer and a filmmaker. So you enjoy looking through the lens. What does this mean to you? What is filmmaking to you?

João Nuno Pinto: Very interesting question. Since I was a kid, I knew that I had to express myself through visual narratives. All my school books, they were full of drawings and comics. I remember I was like seven years old I drew my comic books and I always liked to tell stories visually. And then there was a moment when I said, I’m not good enough at drawing, I’m not able to express the way I see the world in my drawings because I’m not good enough. And so, through cinema I found a way to express myself through the lens. And I just love to shoot movies. I have the fortune to be able to earn money doing what I like through doing commercials or whatever. It’s a blessing for me because I can also work on movies and at the same time it’s a curse because it takes me a long time to do movies for cinema. 

I take years maturing an idea and go and focus on the details. And I like that process of thinking about the story and the characters growing. Now I’m trying to be faster because I’m getting older and I don’t have much time left now. I want to shoot more because this is really fulfills me.

I tried to do documentary and I’m not a documentary type of person because what fascinates me is not to document the world, it’s to create the world. I like this part of creating a world that doesn’t exist but then it exists, you know? For me it exists and becomes a reality and I just love to dive into that. I know many people who became directors because they watched a lot of films, other people’s works. I became a director because I had this need inside myself of expressing myself and I just need to put this out. And of course, I watch films and I love to learn about the others, but the first need came from inside. And because I’m dyslexic, it’s my way of expressing better. It’s in the cinema where I found my voice. 

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: That’s so beautiful. Well, thank you so much for your time and good luck with the movie!