MEMORY HOUSE (2020): João Paulo Miranda Maria’s Film Examines Racism in Contemporary Brazil

Memory House Examines Racism in Contemporary Brazil

João Paulo Miranda Maria’s debut feature film Memory House  – a critical appraisal of racism in modern Brazil – is about to make another appearance on this year’s festival circuit at the San Sebastian Film Festival.

The only Latin American film to be selected at the Cannes film festival this year, Memory House has also been shown at the Toronto festival and will run in the New Director’s Line Up at San Sebastian later this week. Miranda Maria uses minimal dialogue and scenes with richly composed visuals to tell the story of Cristovam (Antonio Pitanga), an indigenous Black man from the rural north of Brazil who migrates to a conservative Austrian-Brazilian community in the south of the country to work at a dairy farm.

Full of imagery from indigenous Brazilian folklore, the film examines what happens to an oppressed minority man as decades of abuse chip away at his humanity. Cristovam’s character undergoes a transformation inspired by the “caboclo boiadeiro” figures of the bull and cowboy, as he comes to realize that he has more in common with the dairy’s cattle than he does with his fellow workers.

A timely commentary on the enduring legacy of colonialism in South America, the screenplay was written and developed at a Cannes Next Step Workshop that Miranda Maria attended in 2015, at a time when his native Brazil was in a state of political upheaval. Later that year impeachment proceedings began against Dilma Rousseff – Brazil’s president at the time – eventually leading to the election of the far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro, frustrating Miranda Maria. The director commented that he has long felt racial tensions simmering just under the surface in Brazil, “which is at odds with its image as a tropical carnival paradise.” He added that portraying these tensions on screen gives a shamanistic element to his work like the spirits invoked by the character in his film.

Born in 1982 in São Paulo, the largest city in Brazil, Miranda Maria graduated in “Cinema and Master” at the University of Campinas. He is a Teacher at the Methodist University of Piracicaba and coordinates for a film collective called Kino-Olho in São Paulo. His films are inspired by the reality of the countryside where he lives.

Brazilian octogenarian actor Antonio Pitanga has starred in over 65 films, multiple soap operas and series, and a dozen plays over the past sixty years. Featuring prominently in the “Cinema Novo” movement, Pitanga has worked with some of the most esteemed directors in Brazilian cinema such as Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Glauber Rocha, Cacá Diegues, Trigueirinho Neto, Roberto Pires, Walter Lima Jr, and Anselmo Duarte.

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