The 16-minute black-and-white film is a meditative look at the mediums who communicate with the dead and engage in psychic healing practices at a spiritual centre known as Luz da Verdade (The Light of Truth). Holding hands and facing a magnetiser, they practise a method which they call a ‘magnetic chain’ – a medical treatment based on a unique understanding of disease and health which contradicts our modern understanding and methods. By juxtaposing details of modern Brazilian architecture, famously located in the cities of Brasilia, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the film relates our modern cities to the twenty astral cities, whose coordinates were mapped inside Brazilian territory by one of Palmelo’s mediums and which have been described as ‘just like those that exist on Earth, but infinitely more perfect’.
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Isa, a young artist invited to propose a project for an exhibition, sets out to stage a dramatic adaptation of ‘The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas’, a satirical 19th-century novel by Machado de Assis. The rehearsal is marred by difficulties which the viewer must interpret as being due to the fact that Isa is a woman, young, black, all of the above, or as difficulties anyone would encounter.
Canoas focuses on the preparations for a cocktail party at Casa das Canoas – the house Oscar Niemeyer built for himself in the early 1950s. The film stages a situation that echoes the house's past use and glamour, set in the contemporary Brazilian cultural scene.
SOAP manipulates the language of cinema and soap operas, accompanying a group of left-wingers’ attempt to infiltrate right- wing social networks. The tactic chosen by the group, composed of intellectuals and cultural agents, is the creation of a telenovela that would convey subversive messages in the apparently conservative form of the religious cultural product.
