In a candlelit café somewhere near Kreuzberg, I meet Fernanda Lübeck—the elusive Brazilian-Swiss director whose work in the emerging Arthouse-Action genre of films has quietly detonated expectations of what a fight scene can mean. Dressed in a red jumpsuit, Lübeck greets me with a normal right-hand handshake, then a second, silent handshake with her left hand to symbolize the “one we didn’t have as children”. Straightaway it’s all very Lübeckian.
She burst onto the scene with 2024’s The Noose That Reloads, a hallucinatory neo-Western set in a post-emotion society where gunshots trigger flashbacks rather than wounds. Her work is dense, lyrical, often absurd—and surprisingly violent. Yet the violence always feels personal, even poetic. Her upcoming film, Twelve Apostrophes in a Gun, has already sparked interest from both the Oban Film Festival and an underground mime syndicate in Belgium.
MARIUS DELACOURT:
Fernanda, thank you for agreeing to this conversation. You’re notoriously reclusive. Some say you don’t exist at all!
FERNANDA LÜBECK:
Hello. I think I do.
DELACOURT:
You’ve been called the “Chekhov of gunfights.” How do you respond to that?
LÜBECK:
Guns are just monologues we haven’t translated yet. Every time someone fires a pistol in my films, they are expressing something repressed—love, loss, the memory of a grandmother, a hurriedly eaten sandwich, etc.
DELACOURT:
Your breakthrough film, The Noose That Reloads, features a 19-minute duel where both characters are asleep. What was your intention with that sequence?
LÜBECK:
Sleep is the only honest choreography. When people are awake, they pose. When they’re asleep, they reveal. I choreographed the duel based on the dreams I had when I was in my twenties. The bullets represent intrusive thoughts.
DELACOURT:
You once said, “The most powerful action scenes are the ones that resist action.” Can you elaborate?
LÜBECK:
Of course. In Twelve Apostrophes in a Gun, there is a moment when the protagonist raises his weapon and… doesn’t fire. For 12 minutes. He just holds it, trembling. Each apostrophe represents a hesitation, a fracture in the sentence of violence. Audiences weep, occasionally from confusion, but usually from recognition.
DELACOURT:
Your films often feature unconventional weapons: a flute filled with bees, a gun that only fires boiling chocolate, a sword made of drawing pins. What draws you to these choices?
LÜBECK:
Conventional weapons are boring. A Glock is too literal. But a cello bow? That has resonance. Literal and metaphorical. I once saw a man silently stab another with a spoon and thought, Finally, someone understands dialogue.
DELACOURT:
How do you work with actors? Many of them say they don’t receive complete scripts, only “Indications of a character”.
LÜBECK:
Correct. I give them only two things: a daily diary entry by their character and a scented envelope that smells like the emotion they should portray that day. For Noose, I made the cast live in an abandoned theme park with no mirrors. They had to learn to act without knowing what they looked like. I think that comes across in the film.
DELACOURT:
Your next film, Twelve Apostrophes in a Gun, is said to involve time travel, ecclesiastical typography, and a single uninterrupted explosion that lasts 47 minutes. What should we expect?
LÜBECK:
Expect nothing. It is a film about punctuation and penitence. It begins with a priest forgetting the word for “bullet,” and ends with a sentient typewriter choosing not to kill the Pope. The action scenes are composed entirely of implied motion. It’s the best Arthouse-Action script I’ve seen, I hope I’ve done it justice.
DELACOURT:
Do you think Arthouse-Action is here to stay?
LÜBECK:
Genres are mis-traced steps, ultimately leading nowhere. Arthouse-Action will persist as long as someone is willing to whisper during a car chase, or cry about their childhood while defusing a bomb.
DELACOURT:
Finally, is it true that you filmed your last movie entirely in reverse, and then burned the original memory cards?
LÜBECK:
Yes. Memory is the only reliable editor. If the audience remembers the film, it was good. If they misremember it, it was perfect.
DELACOURT:
Fernanda, thank you, this has been enlightening.
LÜBECK:
Don’t thank me, go and see my films at the cinema then buy them on dvd and Blu-ray, then pay to download them to each of your devices individually.
Fernanda Lübeck’s Twelve Apostrophes in a Gun premieres this fall at the Itrecht Film Festival and in several abandoned train stations around the world simultaneously.
