Casa de Antiguidades (en)

Casa de Antiguidades

Selection: 

Director: 

João Paulo Miranda Maria

Country: 

  • Brazil
  • France

Type: 

Fiction

Script writer(s): 

João Paulo Miranda Maria

Synopsis: 

A story about loneliness. A man displaced, living far from his origins, who left behind all the past to live in a hostile place, where nobody knows him. A story about lack of human contact, where the only way is to get close of animals. In attempting to better living conditions, the protagonist migrated to the south to work in a big dairy factory. The cold weather with its white and bucolic landscape, the rural silence is only broken by the sound of the industry. Cows are the dairy animals, only machines work with them and there is no human contact. The town is small, consisting from a European colony. The difficulty to adapt the life in a mechanical production system, a kind of alienation. The only way to endure is turning into an animal, in a desperate attempt to get some contact more "human".

Visual concept: 

I chose to a contemplative mise-en-scène, with markings that suggests accidents and alleged "gaffes", where the character is not available in a conventional manner in front of the camera, but he comes up with the camera's look. The image embarrasses and insults the viewer once it is presented to him a gross construction endowed with certain aggressiveness from the elements that are neither ignored nor corrected, assuming an aesthetic of "ugly, natural and crooked." The essence of my work is to value and interpret for my dramaturgy the "hillbilly" style of things, people and reality.