No one to loose

In January 2020, I received the news that Maria Gloria Poltronieri Borges had been raped and killed. I knew this girl as Magó, as did so many others. We got to know each other through the Afro-Brazilian martial art capoeria during a period when I lived in São Paulo in Brazil. The news that Magó had been killed by a stranger, and left alone by a waterfall, not far from her hometown in the state of Paraná in Brazil, came as a shock to me. Magó was strong, one of the most solid in a "roda de capoeira" - a circle of capoeira. I learned so much from her. How could someone manage to take her life? The realization that I, that we, cannot defend ourselves when a man, someone physically stronger, wants to take our life, extinguish the light in our eyes, sank into me like a heavy stone. Magó became a victim of feminicide - the killing of women, because they are women. As a journalist, I have worked on the topic of violence against women, and I have written repeatedly about the phenomenon of femicide, which exists all over the world, but which has its brutal epicenters in countries like Brazil. But what would I say now - now that I knew the girl who became part of a horrifying statistic? I didn't have words, I couldn't write about her, nor was I able to say her name to others when I had to share the story, and my grief. Her name was stuck in my throat. Three years later, I had the opportunity to make a short film on a topic of my choice. As I sat down to write down ideas, Magó came to me. Perhaps by using the film's visual space I could say something about a person I deeply admired, who I miss dearly, and who was exposed to what, to me, is the worst imaginable in life; To be raped - and then killed. The collective resistance against violence against women and against femicide has grown stronger in the last decade. The slogan "ni una menos" in Spanish has spread faster than fire through the continent and further out into the world. For me, it is there, in the collective anger and resistance, that some kind of healing from a terrible loss can be found. For me, it became natural in the film to go via capoeria, and the dance - since Magó was a choreographer and dancer - to try to tell something of her story, something of my grief, and a bit of the rage that mobilizes us to say that enough is enough. We have no one to lose.