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 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. Charlotte Garson