Reclaiming fado on screen:

Lucia Udvardyova: Are you in Lisbon?

João Caçador: Yes

Lucia Udvardyova: What have you been up to recently?

João: We had a show last Friday. It was a national tribute to Portuguese gay poets from the 1970s. It was a really beautiful event with many artists.

Lucia Udvardyova: I guess you’re part of the Lisbon artistic community.

Lila Fadista: It also coincided with the International Day of Social Justice. We hadn’t been on stage since October, so it was nice to return—especially to a full house.

Lucia Udvardyova: Did you take a break from performing?

Lila: Yes, we’ve been on a break for quite some time now, for many reasons—not necessarily because we wanted to. Last year, we created new bands to perform live with two other artists. We also haven’t been doing many shows because we don’t have new material, and we haven’t had an agent for the past year and a half. It’s also quite difficult to get gigs in Portugal, for many reasons.

We have a very good expression in Portuguese that roughly translates to “being in codfish waters”—it means being in a sort of limbo, not knowing what’s going to happen.

Lucia Udvardyova: Sometimes it’s good to be in that kind of state. Many interesting projects arise from these periods of stasis and contemplation rather than action.

Lila: True, but you also have to be careful not to get stuck. The line between accepting that you’re a bit lost and realizing you need to make things happen is very thin.

Lucia Udvardyova: Maybe there’s also pressure from outside. On social media, everyone is expected to be constantly active and to show what they’re doing.

Lila: Exactly. You feel you have to stay relevant, and there are always topics you should be addressing. For us, as very politically driven artists, there are many things we feel we should respond to. But lately, we haven’t been feeling very creative when it comes to new compositions. So yes—we’re in “codfish waters.”

Lucia Udvardyova: The story of your band was intimately portrayed in Justine Lemahieu’s film Them Fado Bicha. How did the film come about?

Lila: Justine saw one of our shows in the neighborhood where she lives here in Lisbon. This was around 2018. She was very moved by it and later wrote to us saying she had the idea of making a film about us. At first, it was supposed to be a short film. We met in a bar here that no longer exists—like many places in Lisbon over the past ten years. During that meeting, she mentioned that she might actually want to make a feature-length film.

At first, I was a bit reluctant because we were just starting as a band. It felt very premature to have someone filming us. But João became more excited about the idea, and we felt a good energy from her, so we decided to give it a try.

Gradually, she became present at many of the things we were doing—shows, and sometimes interviews as well. She integrated herself into our lives in a very quiet, respectful, and attentive way. At the beginning, we were, of course, very aware that someone was filming us, so there was inevitably a certain degree of performance for the camera.

Halfway through the process, she realized that she couldn’t just remain behind the camera. Ethically and artistically, she felt she also needed to be inside the film. So she started asking questions and making comments that were recorded and eventually became part of the movie. There was a real sense of intimacy between us—we care about each other. It was a very beautiful process.

When she had the first rough cuts and asked us for feedback, it was an interesting exercise for us as well: watching a piece of art that is about you, but isn’t yours. You have to find a balance between what is expected and what feels right for you. For example, I focused on what I felt comfortable with and what made me uncomfortable, especially regarding my body and the topics I speak about.

Lucia Udvardyova: There are also very personal moments in the film, when you talk about your families, coming out, and acceptance—or the lack of it.

Lila: When I speak about those things, I’m aware of the place those words will occupy. They can help people understand us and our work better, but they can also serve as a mirror for the audience, whether in a positive or negative sense. There’s a social impact to what I’m saying.

That’s the main reason I expose myself in that way. I don’t really feel the need to speak publicly about my family or my internal processes. I can do that through art, but speaking directly about it isn’t something I feel compelled to do. Later on, when I sit in a cinema with a room full of people watching myself talking about my father, it can be a shock, because that wasn’t on my mind when I originally said it. I have to distance it from my personal emotional world. If it were only about that, I would probably ask Justine to cut it out.

When I watched it in the cinema, it was clear that there’s something universal in those moments that touches people regardless of where they’re from.

Lucia Udvardyova: A big part of your work also has an activist dimension.

João: It was interesting to see how things developed over time. Looking back, there are things I said then that I probably wouldn’t say today, especially the more activist statements. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable to watch.

But I think it was fair to show the process of how we grew, even within the community. Usually, people don’t see themselves or their ideas from five years ago. In that sense, it was a privilege to be filmed from the beginning of our project, even though many of the topics were difficult. For a long time, I didn’t actually believe it would become a film.

Lucia Udvardyova: Do you feel your work in Lisbon has inspired a new generation of artists who work with traditional styles like fado and deconstruct or subvert them?

João: It’s difficult to say that we changed anything, but we were certainly part of a wave of alternative and queer music emerging in Lisbon around 2016–2018. I think that movement brought some changes. Even within fado, we now know several female singers who perform songs about feminist topics and broader political themes rather than only love songs.

Lila: The general music scene and the fado scene move at very different speeds. It may take years before we can really assess what impact we’ve had within the fado world.

Since we started, we’ve seen small shifts—sometimes even in the form of appropriation. As João mentioned, some very established fado singers have begun touching on themes that border on social intervention, though often in such broad ways that they become a bit meaningless, at least in our view. Still, you can see that something has been planted.

For example, in recent years, two traditional fado singers—one male and one female—released songs with music videos depicting love stories between two men and two women. In a way, that was a kind of coming out through song. These are still niche artists, not hugely famous ones, because the fado community is very crystallized and self-contained, which makes change difficult.

Fado feeds on the idea of tradition—the idea that it is the same as it was a hundred years ago. That’s a central part of its identity, even though it’s not entirely true, because it has gone through many transformations, especially before the dictatorship.

So the ideas of change and innovation are strongly resisted. But what we bring—and what we continue to bring—is perhaps less about singing explicitly about queer identities and more about attitude. It’s about reclaiming fado despite what it has represented over the past sixty or seventy years, despite the conservatism, queerphobia, racism, and nationalism that often exist within the community.

We reclaim it and shape it according to our artistic desires. In a way, we’re also reconnecting it to earlier rebellious traditions within fado itself. That spirit of rebellion might be the most impactful thing we bring, because it contradicts what people usually imagine a fado singer or composer to be.

For example, there’s a well-known fado singer who performs in a very famous and expensive venue in Lisbon. We started spending more time with her last year, and I can see how those interactions have influenced her. It gave her a certain permission to express doubts she already had about how the community functions.

I actually started Fado Bicha by myself. When João saw a video of me singing a cappella—completely off-key—he didn’t think, “Oh, we need queer fado.” He felt there was an opportunity to open a door, to create some kind of upheaval. He was already feeling a sense of artistic and personal oppression within the fado community he had been part of for two or three years, but he couldn’t quite articulate it.

So we started experimenting almost blindly, with the attitude: I’ll do this because I need to, regardless of what others think. I believe that attitude is what ultimately creates something constructive for others as well—it allows a sense of freedom to bloom.

João: I think we live in a permission-based society. People feel they need permission for everything. Even now in Portugal, with the rise of the far right, many people seem to feel they finally have permission to express racist, misogynistic, or queerphobic views.

Artists can also create permission—a poetic, immaterial kind of permission. I think Fado Bicha helped open the possibility of mixing queer identities with fado. For two hundred years, that was practically impossible, at least explicitly.

Art can be powerful when it creates that kind of permission and offers a platform. From the beginning, we created the permission to exist. And that permission can be very powerful—even if it’s symbolic.