The Invisibles

The video documentary Os Invisíveis (The Invisibles) was inspired by oral and written
accounts of survivors of the 2011 catastrophe in the Serrana Region of Rio de Janeiro,
including facts and memories from the biography of the actors themselves, resulting in
a self-fiction text, focusing on the Documental Objects Theater.(Teatro de Objetos
Documentais)
Directed by Miguel Vellinho, Master and Doctor in performing arts from UNIRIO, with
more than 30 years of experience in Animation Theater, the documentary was
produced, rehearsed and envisaged in a virtual way through internet meetings (zoom,
meet..) and filmed in the city of Nova Friburgo with the five members of Companhia
Arteira.
January 2011. Environment of destruction, affecting the physical, emotional and
psychic spheres of the residents of Nova Friburgo. Brief reports and images that reveal
the state of isolation, relating it to emotional states and situations experienced
according to the social isolation in 2020 and 2021, during the COVID 19 pandemic.
Mud-covered inner ruins; eyes fixed to memories, objects and their stories.
The five characters in this fictional documentary video are created from real
testimonies, collected by the actors among residents of Nova Friburgo: witnesses,
survivors and victims of the tragedy of 2011. These testimonies, at many points meet,
mix and conflate with stories and memories of the actors themselves – creators, who,
being also residents of Nova Friburgo, experienced this catastrophe in various ways.
Each of them reports elements and experiences of the same event, narrating their
experiences, feelings and memories, from different perspectives.
The film is organized and defined as a documentary that explores some fictional
elements, since part of the reports collected from the survivors of the rains of 2011,
which destroyed much of the city of Nova Friburgo (RJ), are reviewed and revived by
the actors. This mixture of fictionality and reality contradicts itself conceptually;
however, the speeches, the stories, the dramas that were experienced in those days
gain another body and another voice, resonating again after exactly 10 years of the
incident.
Thus, in the same way that five stories were picked amongst so many collected during
the research, the five members of the company are equally pinched from their present
realities, in a pandemic situation, and placed in a timeless environment outside the
possibility of temporal recognition. To do so, a ruined building in Nova Friburgo served
as a location for the filming of the documentary which is also structured in pairing the
situation of five citizens of Nova Friburgo in a state of geographic isolation due to the
tragedy of 2011 with the new moment of isolation, now imposed by the new
coronavirus in 2020/2021.
There are several qualities of contradictory images that come from television reports
of 2011, images of details of this ruined construction that will serve as the main
location of the audiovisual product, aerial images captured by a drone especially for
this work, that give views of the city at rarely seen angles, details of objects rescued in
the tragedy and gently ceded to the project, and finally, images of the entire cast with
their bodies completely covered in clay and a fictional situation that ties all the stories.
All this blends together with the testimonies of the tragedy.
With sound interventions specially created for the documentary by musician and
conductor Maurício Durão and directed by Miguel Vellinho, The Invisibles ( Os
Invisíveis) dialogues both with the recent past and the present, and, in this sense, its
urgency is more than welcome in a worldly moment that asks for knowledge, ability to
review and plan for a possible future for all of us.