While the team worked in Lençóis Maranhenses, editor Sergio Mekler started a parallel editing process in Rio de Janeiro. According to him, this was only possible because the shooting schedule followed the order of the script, which allowed for complete sequences to be sent.

“I was there during the first week, which was great in order to get the atmosphere of the place. Afterwards, as the scenes arrived in Rio, I made a first cut following exactly what was written. This was possible because he filmed with two cameras, allowed me various options. From there on in, we started experimenting.”

“Bangu I,” (one of Rio’s high security prisons), was the nickname given to the editing studio set up in the director’s house, which literally held them prisoner. Andrucha and Mekler remained confined trying all the possibilities; even the most improbable were welcome, because they opened up other doors.

It was six months work, trying to resolve the sequences with the least amount of shots possible.

“Like Fernanda Montenegro said, The House of Sand is almost a theorem. At the beginning of the film Áurea is practically mute. So, one image is added to another, successively, generating a universe. Practically everything is comprehensible without the use of words. We wanted to find the language of cinema and discovered it together with the story, throughout editing,” explains Mekler. “There is nothing in the film that has an aspect I don’t like. Sometimes a director insists that it has to be his way or no way, and that’s the end of that. But with Andrucha this doesn’t happen: we solved all problems together. It was great to do this work, I’m satisfied.”

The special effects in The House of Sand, although necessary, are simple. The main difficulty for the supervisor, Fábio Soares, was to prevent them from interfering in the film’s simplicity.

“Andrucha called me to read the script and we soon saw that the effects would not be explicit. The concept of the effects was very conservative,” recalls Soares.

The special effects were applied, basically, on four occasions: the star-filled sky, the eclipse, the war planes, and when the two characters of Fernanda Montenegro are in the same scene. The House of Sand is the first Brazilian film to be finalized in 2K, a digital format that offers the best image resolution quality and the widest range of colors without compromising optical quality.

For the sake of comparison, the HD (high definition) model normally used in Brazilian productions, works at 1920 x 1080 pixels resolution, at 8 bits, while 2K works with 2048 x 1536 pixels resolution, at 10 bits. The film’s post-production services were provided by co-producer TeleImage.

“It was a great challenge to finalize the film in 2K. This process places you in a post-production situation very different from the norm, allowing for all the possibilities of digital resources without loosing optical quality. On the other hand, it is a slow process and the files are gigantic,” tells Soares.