The Remainings

This hybrid short is a tale about ghosts, memory, and resistance, but above all, a portrait of my hometown, Belo Horizonte, in Brazil. A portrait of its history, marked by the destruction and disregard for its memory since its foundation 120 years ago. In Belo Horizonte, everything is ruins: nothing is preserved, everything is destroyed. And as a result, its past becomes full of ghosts that exist to remind us of what once was and is no longer with us today.

It is precisely in this sense that I see Iolanda, the protagonist of this story. An elderly resident of the capital, Iolanda was a victim of an administrative error and was accidentally declared dead when someone having her exact same name, is buried in a local cemetery. I met her in 2017, through a publication of the case on a tabloid, and I filmed her over a few weeks with the curiosity and proximity on camera of being in front of someone who was, in some way, between life and death. To avoid problems with the case before the courts, we stopped filming until everything was resolved. In the meantime, watching her images, I came across a strong and lucid woman, even though faced with the absurdities that she was living in the legal bureaucracy to prove her own existence. Above all, I came across a woman who knew the history of Belo Horizonte very well, and who was there reminiscing not as a nostalgic time to be relived, but as an alert to pay attention to what we are doing with the future of the city and the country.

In such gloomy political times where the president celebrates the past dictatorship, museums are set on fire and the city's urbanism is increasingly reduced to giving space to new parking lots, I see Iolanda as a hero, but also as a ghost. A ghost that wanders a city with no trace of time and that resists even when everything seems to fall apart.