Present Body

In my work, I always try to address pertinent themes that illuminate contemporaneity and its most prominent issues. Therefore, I carry out a broad conceptual, political and aesthetic research in order to support and build the filmic and narrative discourses. The desire to make the film was born from my interest in exploring fundamental issues of the present day and continuing with my creative research, which has been outlined since my first short films until my first feature “Shaky but Steady” and the series “Cartographies of the Body” (in pre-production), in which identity issues and artistic processes are always in vogue.

The documentary addresses a current subject, highly relevant, and, in a certain way, urgent. The society must take part and engage in debate regarding the body, what it means and will in the future. Paradigm shifts have been outlined in different areas of knowledge. How has the body been seen and interpreted by medical sciences and technologies? Are we beings only made from matter and information? What is our corporeality? What defines the human being? These questions must be answered by society as a whole, since the definition itself of what is human is being discussed and the lines which distinguish them constantly change.

With this questioning atmosphere, it is intended to inquire about the weight that the body has in the construction of each one's life and, beyond that, to rescue the significance of what it is to be present in the world. In this sense, by exhibiting the different ideas and inventive possibilities that corporeality gives us, we open doors for the reflection of a new determination of identity. The movie invites the viewer to walk through these doors in different companies.

My goal is to create a film that is innovative in its concept and that combines different experiences and thoughts in relation to a topic that is relevant and crucial for us to understand who we are as a society and as individuals. Today, I believe that the body is at the center of all the most urgent, social and philosophical issues in the world. Because Brazil is a multi-racial country, I myself have an indigenous ethnicity and I have several black activist friends, and being gay myself and part of the LGBT community, I have already suffered prejudice and I closely observe the daily struggle of friends and acquaintances for money, dignity and for life itself. The topic naturally interests me, for personal reasons but at the same time as Brazil is going through a very strong conservative wave, nothing more important than discussing these issues, reinforcing the visibility and highlighting the risks that minorities face today, and also how art and artists are important to reveal these important questions. An extremely important topic, even more so when we take into account that we still don't know where the body can go, with all the changes that are happening, in medicine, technology, surgeries, etc.

Being an artist and living with performers who use the body as an expression, sometimes in a radical way, I feel close and interconnected with the aesthetic, political and social issues raised and addressed from our physical matter or even from its abandonment. In my projects I am interested in exploring the fertile tension between different languages and supports. The friction between them fascinates and instigates me. One of my ambitions is precisely to innovate in articulating documentary, fiction and performance with their unique characteristics, within the narrative flow of cinema. The aim is to establish a filmic discourse that can encompass these different languages. Performance, for its ability to reveal the body beyond the rationalizing sense, is fundamental in “Present Body” to understand corporeality in its greater subjectivity. From the creation of exclusive performances for the film, we intimately and singularly access contemporary issues that normally escape conventional language. An important point of the project, and a challenge as a director, was precisely to create a cinematographic way of filming the different performances, establishing visual and montage links that echo its organicity, time and the strength of the body's presence inside the film.

Another point worth emphasizing is the commitment to language innovation, much from photography and art direction, bringing elements from the fine arts. In a world where the large streaming networks start to dominate the market, cinema and audiovisual risk less and lose part of their freshness by not exploring new narrative and language proposals, the film tries to go against this trend, and still communicate with the audience.

There is still a desire for diversity. We opted for characters and performances that were plural enough to give voice to a large number of people, especially those whose voices were always silenced, such as the identitary and economic minorities, the non-standard bodies and the countless victims of colonization. From the body on, the most diverse issues are crossed: feminism, sexuality, violence, slavery, physical disability, LGBT subculture with its struggles, among others. In this way, I do not intend to develop a single path of understanding, but to confront different views and form a wide range of understanding and investigation about our corporeality and existence. The desire is to put contemporaneity on stage, together with all its plurality, fluidity and symbology.

It should be noted that I have been researching and involved with the theme of the body for over 6 years, including a series and a telefilm still in pre-production, which will have a more discursive approach. The “Present Body” project has been selected over the years, in its different stages for important festivals, markets and laboratories such as Cinemundi 2016/2020 (development and production), Festival de Málaga - MAFIZ 2018 and recently Ficviña Industry Laboratory for Work in Progress and Labex Argentina in the Latin American Competence for rough cuts.