The pour
The Pour is a short film that centers on a single, suspended gesture: a woman holding a bucket of vivid red paint above a blank canvas. In stillness, tension builds—not through action, but through the weight of what is about to be revealed. When the paint finally flows, it activates hidden silhouettes beneath the surface, transforming them into names—invocations of women erased by history, violence, or systemic neglect.
The work engages directly with intersectional feminism by honoring women across geographies and identities whose stories have been marginalized or deliberately obscured. The act of pouring is not destruction but restoration: a reclamation of presence through pigment, memory, and bodily resolve. The woman’s extended arm becomes a site of bodily autonomy and agency, her choice to pour, when to pour, and what it reveals is hers alone. Her calm posture holds both vulnerability and defiance, echoing the quiet strength required to exist and resist in patriarchal structures.
Sisterhood and companionship are evoked not through physical proximity, but through shared absence made visible. The emerging names – Maria, Jasmine, Amara, Li –stand in for countless others, forming an invisible network of solidarity across time and space. The neutral environment strips away distraction, focusing attention on skin, metal, and color: the intimate textures of lived experience contrasted with industrial indifference.
Rooted in a realist aesthetic yet charged with symbolic resonance, The Pour aligns with the festival’s theme by making visible the structures of erasure that shape experiences of womanhood and the persistent, collective acts of remembrance that dismantle them. It asks: Who gets to be seen? Whose memory is preserved? And how might a single gesture of care become a political act of repair?
-
Fabio BolaDirector
-
Istefânia RubinoDirector
-
Project Type:Experimental, Short
-
Runtime:3 minutes 45 seconds
-
Completion Date:January 6, 2026
-
Country of Filming:Brazil
-
Film Color:Color
-
First-time Filmmaker:No
-
Student Project:No
-
Digital Cinema Package:Unavailable
Fabio Bola’s ACADEMIC BACKGROUND: He holds a doctorate (PPGARTES-UERJ) (with a grade 10 scholarship from FAPERJ) and a postdoctorate in arts (PPGAV-UFRJ). He holds a docto-rate in philosophy from IFCS/UFRJ, and his thesis in the area of philosophy of art, "The Aesthetics of the Grotesque in Comics," defended in 2014, expands on his study on the subject conducted in 2011. He completed a sandwich doctorate with Richard Shusterman in 2013 at Florida Atlantic Uni-versity (USA). He taught Visual Communication at BA/UFRJ in 2016 and 2017.
Lattes: http://lattes.cnpq.br/9071731543124915 See all diplomas at: https://photos.app.goo.gl/h6j5BkK4KH1KGBwcA
PROFESSIONAL TRAINING: Fabio Bola is a musician, composer, artist, videomaker, designer, producer, researcher, collaborating professor at UFRJ and co-coordinator of extension activities at UFRJ. In 2025, the Neuro Masters festival (Moscow, Russia) selected the following video art pieces for exhibition: Burn, Nature, Aion, Nanovideo Anthropozoid, and Robot Crab. At Music Imbizo 2025 in Durban, South Africa, he was invited and presented the video art piece “Burn.” With the same work, he won a special jury prize at the 2nd Yeosu International Web Drama Film Festival. Also in 2025, he participated with several films (“Now is Now,” “Nanovideo Anthropozoid v4,” “One Minute on the Processed Street,” and “Robot Crab”) in the Croatian OneMinute Film Festival, Pozega, Croatia. Latest updates can be found at https://www.instagram.com/fabiobolax/ and https://www.behance.net/magneticstudiobr.
Istefania Rubino is PhD candidate in the Graduate Program in Performing Arts, School of Commu-nication, UFRJ (PPGAC/ECO/UFRJ). Master's degree in Contemporary Art and Culture, specializ-ing in Art History and Criticism, from the Graduate Program in Arts (PPGARTES) at the State Uni-versity of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), where she defended her dissertation entitled: "Viscerality in the Work of Anna Bella Geiger (1965-1969)”. She also has Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from the School of Fine Arts at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).
