Tamar Guimarães

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.

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.