Portuguese with English subtitles

Against the backdrop of the end of the dictatorship in Brazil, I began this film focusing on what was marginal and invisible in the public sphere. Many were absent or ignored in this process, including Indigenous populations, maroon communities, people in reformatories and asylums, prisoners, and women confined to the supposedly apolitical space of the domestic. I decided to focus on the latter, asking myself: what politics of everyday life were constituted there?

I have always been interested in mothers and housework. In the hidden battle fought inside homes that have not been considered protests, but perhaps they should be. This is also part of my story. Born and raised by an adolescent mother in Brasília, the centre of the country’s institutional and representative power. In 2016, I decided to print posters and stick them on bus stops in my hometown, looking for women whose life paths had crossed my own. At the time, I did not yet concatenate what I had experienced, but I wanted to learn more and I wanted to remember. Hence, I began searching for hidden histories, which for me are linked to amateurism as a value.

Vermelho bruto is sewn from a hybrid archive of home movies and contemporary footage created by Jô, Alessa, Fabiana and Eunice: four women who became teenage mothers during Brazil’s first democratic elections in the late ’80s. The film is driven by the poetic and radical gestures of each of them in their surroundings, rather than by any intelligible division between them or the events. The textures and qualities differ in image and sound. Noises and scratches take on a ghostly dimension. Yet the body is ever-present, whether in the act of filming or being filmed. In voice and breath. The present tense has a brutality, I believe, that destabilises temporalities. I see the film as an experience of wandering and collecting. As something that escapes light, resolution and linear time. It’s as the saying goes: Esú killed a bird yesterday with the stone he threw today. (Amanda Devulsky)

The screening will be followed by a conversation with Amanda Devulsky (in English).

• Sektion Section: Film
• Programm Programme: they gave us flames, we made a fire 3