Willy Hajli builds on Castles & Ruins

Can you tell us a little about your journey into directing?

It started with research, long before I called it directing. I've always been pulled in by the different ways people express themselves: music, writing, the way they move, the way they dress, the symbols they carry without ever naming them. Underneath all of it, I was curious about what actually shapes a culture.

That's what led me towards more experimental filmmakers, artists who don't treat the image as a record of something but as an evocation of it. That distinction became the thing I care about most. I tend to fall in love with a context and a set of references first, and then go looking for the language of cinema that can carry it.

The film marks ten years since BK released Castelos & Ruínas. How did you and Poeta Visual begin translating the album's legacy, and everything that has happened in BK's life since, into a new visual work?

The album is built on friction, opposing ideas rubbing against each other and never quite resolving. Early on, we knew a linear, single-genre approach would betray the record. We wanted something closer to how memory actually works: each shot and each world carrying its own meaning, and only together forming a bigger picture.

I tend to fall in love with a context and a set of references first, and then go looking for the language of cinema that can carry it.

That fragmented form became a statement in itself, the film remembering BK's life, as an artist and as a person, the way memory really does. In pieces.

The film combines intimate, poetic words from BK's mother with stark and sometimes confrontational images. What did you want that juxtaposition between tenderness and severity to make the audience feel?

At the centre of the film is a conversation between BK and his mother, who passed recently. She narrates to her son, still in the womb, the path he'll one day walk, and the music isn't sung but spoken, as if he's answering her about the life he's already lived.

We recorded her voice in Oromo, the language tied to the name Abebe Bikila, so even the tenderness carries history. I wanted the softness of her words against those harsh, sometimes confronting images to leave people somewhere unresolved, moved and unsettled at the same time. Not comforted, not pushed away, but caught in the same tension BK lives inside: inheritance and hardship arriving together, neither one cancelling the other.

The central idea places the protection of the "castle" against the exposure and vulnerability of the "ruin". How did those two allegories guide the film's imagery and characters?

The castle is the feminine in the film, the enclosure, the place he watches from, both where he leaves from and returns to. The ruin is the masculine, the outside, the conflict, the journey that keeps throwing obstacles at him.

We made those ideas visible through very specific cultural and historical symbols from BK's world. The three women are really one presence with three faces: the mother, played by a young woman; the elder beside her, an older version of the same figure, played by a mãe de santo, a priestess and ritual leader in Candomblé; and the dancer, who carries the resistance running through African dance: protection, calling, ancestry.

The film jumps between very different worlds: a womb, a battlefield, a place of dance and calling.

She wears the uniform of the Frente Negra Brasileira, Brazil's first Black party, to root the film's cosmic side in real political struggle. The fighters wear the traditional garb of West African Dambe boxers, to give the ruins that animistic charge of constant battle.

BK moves through all of it, revisiting his own path while his mother's voice guides him, and the film keeps insisting that remembering the past and imagining a future can be the same act.

Why was black and white essential to the film, and what did removing colour allow you and cinematographer Rafael Mattar to emphasise?

Black and white was there from the start. The film jumps between very different worlds: a womb, a battlefield, a place of dance and calling. Colour would have locked each one to a specific time and place. Losing it let Rafael and me hold them all in one register, so the symbols could talk to each other instead of sitting in separate scenes.

It also pulls the film towards memory, which never comes back to us in accurate colour. It comes back as light, contrast, a gesture. What's left without colour is the body, the skin, the way light falls, and that's exactly what I wanted people reading. It put us closer to the essay film, to Akomfrah and Jafa.

The cinematography repeatedly uses silhouettes, deep shadows and bodies emerging from or disappearing into darkness. What role did shadow play in the film's visual language?

BK opens the album in the shadows, a place that looks like the margins but is really about uncertainty, and for him that's where freedom lives. So shadow wasn't emptiness for us, it was the material the film is made of.

Bodies surfacing out of the dark and slipping back into it became our way of showing how memory and ancestry behave: a figure appears, you recognise it, it recedes. It echoes birth, the film begins in the womb, and it echoes the ruin, the exposed self with nowhere to hide.

A silhouette also stops being one specific person and opens onto something older and shared, so someone could be an individual and an ancestor in the same frame.

Although the film is rooted in an album and an artist, it won in Video Art rather than Music Video. Does that distinction feel meaningful to you, and where do you think Castelos & Ruínas sits between film, music video and visual art?

It does feel meaningful, though not because I'd set the two apart. The music is genuinely in the film's DNA, and I'm glad it can live in a music video conversation as much as an art one.

Music is genuinely in the film's DNA, and I'm glad it can live in a music video conversation as much as an art one.

If anything, winning in Video Art just confirmed how much the piece reaches across categories. I don't think it sits cleanly in any one box, and I wouldn't want it to. The music is in its bones, it's structured like an essay, and it thinks like visual art. That refusal to settle mirrors the album, which was built on paradox and never meant to resolve. The in-between isn't a compromise, it's where the film wants to be.

What did making this film teach you that you'll take into your next project?

That authenticity has to be built into who's actually in the room. So much of what works here comes from the film being made by people who belong to the context it shows: the fighters cast by a casting director from Benin, the mãe de santo, the voice found through real research among Ethiopian women. None of that announces itself on screen, but you feel it.

The other thing was patience, trusting that if the symbols and the sound are placed carefully enough, I don't need to step in and explain the meaning.