Lucia Murat is honored at the 8th SFG Audiovisual Exhibition in 2021. Throughout her long career, the filmmaker has worked on issues that discuss women’s struggles, in the most varied contexts. In this sense, the role of women in political activism in defense of democracy in Brazil takes on an important point in some of her work. Murat started her career as a journalist in Rio de Janeiro. In 1971 she was arrested and tortured. The memories of the prison during the dictatorship were explored in her 1989 film How nice to see you alive, awarded at the film festivals of Havana, Rio de Janeiro and Brasília.
In 2013, Murat testified to the Comissão da Verdade in which she described in detail the tortures suffered during her time in jail, denouncing the name of the torturers. This testimony was fundamental to the conclusion of the commission’s report.
Subjects such as social issues and indigenous resistance are also important points in her works, given the production of films like Brave New Land (2000); Another Love Story (2007); The Nation That Didn´t Wait for God (2015); and Ana (2020); and the documentary series Traces of Brazil (2019).
Her trajectory of political and social struggles, in addition to her award winning career in cinema, made Lucia Murat a reference. Along with Tizuka Yamasaki and Suzana Amaral – and many years after Cléo de Verberena, a filmmaker in the 1930s – Lúcia is one of the pioneering women in Brazilian film production.
Year: 1989 Length: 100 min Country: Brasil Actors: Irene Ravache
Four years after a military coup overthrew the Brazilian government in 1964, all civil rights were suspended and torture became a systematic practice. Using a mix of fiction and documentary this extraordinary film is a searing record of personal memory, political repression and the will to survive. Interviews with eight women who were political prisoners during the military dictatorship are framed by the fantasies and imaginings of an anonymous character, portrayed by actress Irene Ravache.
Filmmaker Murat, like the interviewees, was herself tortured and imprisoned; her award-winning film shatters the silence imposed on the survivors and the collective will to forget
Actors:
Angel Vianna, Nathalia Tilmberg, Maria Alice Poppe e Andréa Beltrão
“In three acts” is inserted in the frame of a film between fiction and non-fiction, a proposal of poetic essay that has been exploding in the world cinema. The increasingly tenuous limit between fiction and documentary has allowed one to work without preconceived frames. The film deals with finitude and continuity, old age and youth working with the body, through contemporary dance and with the word, in texts by Simone de Beauvoir. The dance, choreographed by João Saldanha, is at the same time a tribute to Angel Vianna, an icon of contemporary Brazilian dance, who participated in the film at age 85. Angel dances with Maria Alice Poppe, his former student, who is at the height of his vigor. To this dance performance, which makes a counterpoint without clichés between these two bodies, is added the texts of Simone de Beauvoir interpreted by Nathalia Timberg and Andrea Beltrão. These texts are freely inspired by interviews of the author, in the books “The oldness” and “A very sweet death”, in which the writer wrote on the death of the mother. Held in partnership with TSProductions, with whom Taiga has already co-produced “Quase Dois Irmãos”, the film has the French support of Milena Poylo and Gilles Sacoud.
Actors:
Irene Ravache; Simone Spoladore; Franco Nero; Clarisse Abujamra; Hamilton Vaz Pereira; Mário José Paz; Miguel Thiré; Patrick Sampaio; Juliana Helcer; Zécarlos Machado; Ricardo Dantas; Pablo Uranga; Hugo Gonçalves; Otávio Augusto; Elaine Vilela; Pablo Sanábio; Nathália Murat; Oswaldo Mendes; Valéria Monteiro; Fernando Bezerra; Natália Lorda; Ovidici Puscalau; Naruna Kaplan de Macedo; Eduardo Estrela; Rodrigo Oliveira; Bianca Joy; Eduardo Cravo; Babu Santana.
Ana is dying. Ex-guerrilla, icon of the Left, she is the last link of a group of friends that resisted the military dictatorship in Brazil. On the waiting room of a health clinic they meet again. Unsuccessful utopias, terrorism and sexual liberation from the point of view of two generations, a group of ex-guerrillas and their children, are the themes of this film. Narrated as a puzzle, in a sequence of emotions and sensations that do not obey a classic narrative, the film shows Ana only when young, as she had never left the 1960s. She is young, beautiful and dangerously fragile.
