Eliza Capai

What if it were possible to travel back in time to dream of other futures? In the hinterlands of Brazil, young girls navigate the delicate transition from childhood to adolescence while grappling with social media, religion, their dreams, and the stories of the women who came before them. By inventing a time machine, they revisit the pasts of their mothers and grandmothers and imagine a future in which they can be free, fulfilled, and in control of their own choices.

From saved memories of a long journey, a letter is sent to the future. Alone, away from home and on the eve of her 30th birthday, a Brazilian is on a journey through Africa. In the letter to her daughter, she tells of encounters with women living in their cultures and times. A diary, a road movie and an invitation to all the people who lead their own paths.

When numerous schools in São Paulo were slated to be closed in 2015 as a result of the worsening socio-political crisis, students occupied more than a thousand public buildings in an unprecedented act of self-empowerment. Filmmaker Eliza Capai shows the development of the many-voiced protests, using news excerpts, self-conducted interviews and recordings made with activists’ own cell phone cameras. From the first demonstrations in 2013 and continuing all the way to the election of the extreme right-wing presidential Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, Capai’s highly political work becomes more and more relevant with each passing day.

After surviving the massacre in which the police killed ten landless workers in Pará’s Amazon region, Fernando dos Santos becomes the only survivor to reveal his identity and testify. Still shaken, he recounts how the police murdered his boyfriend and tortured his companions, yet the film portrays him as far more than a victim: a courageous man who left the city’s comfort to chase the dream of owning land, using humor and intelligence to endure the solitude of being a gay man in rural Brazil. Alongside him is José Vargas, an idealistic lawyer defending the survivors and their right to justice. As he faces threats and isolation, the film exposes the human cost of truth, resilience, and the struggle for dignity in a land scarred by violence and inequality.

The drought in Sao Paulo is the starting point of the journey. Uneasy with the images of empty reservoirs of hydrodams in southeastern Brazil, a filmmaker seeks to understand these pharaonic constructions, now built in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. Among the Xingu, Tapajós and Ene rivers, echo the voices of riverines, indigenous people and fishermen and those affected by the arrival of so-called development. A boat movie and a reflection on the impact of our lifestyle.