Casa (en)

Casa

Selection: 

Director: 

Letícia Simões

Country: 

  • Brazil

Format: 

Feature film

Type: 

Documentary

Script writer(s): 

Letícia Simões, with the collaboration of Eduardo Valente and Hilton Lacerda

Synopsis: 

The return of an absent daughter to the city where she was born, fearful of a crisis of sanity of her bipolar mother, is the trigger for this familiar rapprochement. Letícia, the newly separated daughter, blames herself for having distanced herself from her mother in these ten years away from home; Heliana, the mother, is facing a serious depressive crisis that began with the decision to put her mother, Carmelita, in a nursing home. When confronted with Heliana's obsession with the past - she archives pictures, diaries, correspondences and objects from the whole family - Letícia believes that memory is a way of recreating this intimacy. But to open these files, the daughter will have to convince her mother, who keeps them locked up. In the construction of spaces of affection among these women, Home questions what is sanity, what is memory, what is feminine, what is solitude.

Visual concept: 

Home is thought of as a mixed documentary of observation and direct cinema. A daughter filming her mother and her grandmother. A camera that films them both. To create the record of intimacy, one hopes for a nearby camera that will accompany the daily relationship between these three women. A camera focused on the details of a everyday life, a camera that is fixed, still. The people enter and leave the frame; not otherwise. The daughter does not know how to film her mother and sometimes this filmmaking is ugly and uncomfortable.