Marvin Wilson

EB: Marvin, to start, could you introduce yourself to the Brazilian audience? How did your journey as a self-taught filmmaker begin?

I come from the independent scene: theatre, music, performance. Six years ago I
discovered film for myself—first experiments, then commissions, then the realisation that small crews can achieve big things. Since then I’ve worked independently: few means,
close intimacy.

EB: You’ve been working independently since 2020. What led you to take that path, and how has it shaped your creative voice?

It started pragmatically: I wanted to work in film, learn, and make a living. Commissioned jobs put me in situations I’d never have sought on my own—where I learned a lot. Shaping for me was achieving a lot with very little, telling with what’s already there, and pushing formats to their limits.

EB:  Phantasma is rooted in your own autobiographical experience. What made you decide that this deeply personal story needed to take the form of an experimental short film?

I was told very different stories about my mother and my early childhood—I have no memories of my own. That absence isn’t a lack but a space between imagination,intimation, longing, and defence that has shaped me physically and psychologically. PHANTASMA tries to tell this unrememberable story as it feels to me now, without any possibility of verification: open in form, sensorial, subjective.

EB: The film places us inside the sensory world of a newborn, using subjective camera work and fragmented audio. How did you go about designing this immersive point of view?

I’m interested in how meaning arises before language divides. At first everything is mixed: voice as noise, light as pressure, touch that sounds—one overwhelming event. For a newborn, the mother becomes the pivot of reality; space, sounds, and colours form her aura. We only see faces that large and that close in cinema—or in love.

EB:  The narrative explores postpartum psychosis and the rupture of the mother-child bond. How did you navigate the emotional weight of this subject while also maintaining artistic distance during the creative process?

I didn’t want to explain but to make it felt—without judgment or psychologising. Luca Maret Kern is wonderful; we took our time, moved carefully, and talked a lot. The camera became almost a body. To “rescue”—as an image—the child I once was at the window was a deeply moving moment and a confirmation of the path.

EB: You describe the experience portrayed in the film as something beyond conscious memory but still resonant. What does the word “phantasm” mean to you in this context?

For me, phantasm names the tension between fantasy, illusion, memory, and desire. It means a pre-individual, unreflected event that can never be fully grasped—something we feel before we understand it, and that shapes us. It isn’t a retrievable image but a persistent echo that shows itself in how we meet the world and ourselves. Cinema can make that experienceable: not as proof through concepts or explanations, but as a resonance space for an event—an aesthetic experience that engages our imagination.

EB: Your work is often described as quiet, restrained, and poetic. How do you balance emotional intensity with subtlety in your storytelling?

For me, tension lives in the unshown—off-screen sound, omission, silence. Subtlety is also a stance: not to lead, but to offer. From that, something very particular—perhaps poetic—can emerge.

EB: Does working outside the traditional film industry offer you more creative freedom, or does it also come with its own challenges?

Funding is slow and makes processes complex; audiences for experimental cinema are rare—which makes it all the nicer when they appear. The freedom: to pursue ideas that are risky or initially absurd. The task: to bring people along. Your selection shows me there’s a real space for this.

EB: What role does sound play in your films? In Phantasma, the distortion of sound seems just as vital as the image in shaping perception.

Sound isn’t decoration—it carries perception. While a newborn’s visual field is limited to about 30 cm, sound has no edge —it overlaps, permeates, arrives from everywhere, and awakens preconscious associations. Distortion, off-screen sounds, and breath are meant to place the audience in that pre-linguistic, bodily state. The music by Johannes Krauss (aka HannoBanno) gathers this into an inner movement that slowly emerges—not explanatory, but condensing.

EB: Do you think your approach to cinema is influenced by your experience of loss and disconnection, or do these themes emerge more subconsciously?

Loss is less a topic than a ground tone. It doesn’t appear as a programme; it structures my perception. I’m interested in how the absence of things, people, feelings, actions, words makes them present in the imagination—and invites the audience’s attention to participate and co-inscribe. Loss remains a theme only insofar as I’ve never felt I had a place in a coherent, meaningful reality, nor do I believe such coherence exists; it has to be made. The paradox of loss, as I understand it, is that something is missing that was never there—and so it arises, of course, unconsciously.

EB: How do you hope audiences will respond to Phantasma, especially those who may not have experienced anything similar in their own lives?

I hope for openness rather than judgement—especially in a field where mothers facing postpartum psychosis are often demonised and silenced. This film isn’t about what exactly happened, but that it happens. Identification isn’t necessary; receptivity is. PHANTASMA invites a sensorial, existential experience in which not-understanding is part of the effect. The aim is resonance, not instruction.

EB: What are you working on next? Are you continuing to explore autobiographical material or heading in a different direction?

Next I’m writing a multi-perspective hybrid of documentary and fiction collaboratively. It starts from the biographical experience of a Syrian friend, which we condense and make experienceable from several viewpoints—not retold, but translated into a filmic experience. Moving away from the purely autobiographical means, for me: relationships as a starting point—and their entanglements.