Swirl
(Girimunho)

“All right, you’re dead now. What more do you want?” In her São Romão
home, in the Brazilian Sertão, eighty-year old Bastú sheds no tears when
she finds her husband Feliciano dead in his bed. Yet the impassible composure
she displays in front of her grandchildren hides a complex process
of mourning: she is tormented by the presence of the dead man,
hearing him in his blacksmith workshop at night. How can she be scared
when she recalls having fun firing a gun as a young girl? In this mixture
of ethnology, local music (with superb singing by Maria, the grandmother’s
friend) and magic realism (the film-makers make references to
novelists João Guimarães Rosa and Gabriel Garcia Marques), non-professional
actors play their own parts within their own environments
and daily objects. Director of photography Ivo Lopes Araujo is a master in
the art of the digital image (he photographed A Grão, shown in the 2011
2010 ? Continent J programme). His cinematography lends a melancholy
poetry to the mixture of walls reddened by the earth and São Romão’s
rare modern buildings. The dry soil is only irrigated by the São Francisco
river. Regionalism gradually gives way to a more universal theme: the
inexorable, yet happy rythme of life as it is, of death as it comes. CG