Vermelho bruto

"In her film entitled Rough Red, Amanda Devulsky endeavours to tell History differently, to show the reverse angle of political action, as well as to postulate that another form of resistance is possible. By shedding light on the lived experience of those who are unseen in public space, she has authored a historiography of the hidden. The people she films are Jô, Eunice, Alessa and Fabiana, four women who were still teenagers when they became mothers, at a time when Brazil itself was becoming a democracy, during the 1985-1995 decade, in Brasilia. Four women experiencing the strains of motherhood, and whose struggles were not played out in public but rather in the private space of the home. Blending personal archives with images drawn from the 2018 campaign leading up to Jair Bolsonaro's election, Amanda Devulsky constructs a monumental narrative. By choosing a long time-span, she daringly presents spectators with an experience not unlike the trajectory of these women, who elbow their way into History, then extract themselves from it before entering it again. Long silences are in fact invitations to gaze upon the details of their world: views of buildings that are emblematic sites of power, snippets from military marches or from private homes. Although the abrupt camera moves do imply the very presence of shooting bodies, the director almost never shows them being shot, or else in very fragmentary fashion. Words and the sound of breathing weave their way into this silent fabric, between pixels and grain. The cropping of images establishes anew the materiality of archives and illuminate their hidden poetry. Intimate voices that were long silenced burst chaotically in the interstices of this living mosaic. Images are not merely traces of past times but also sites of an aesthetic experience, thus being granted fresh meaning, just like this stardust revealed in the detail of a film photo. Informed by a poetics of the gaze, Rough Red is also an invitation to observe the infinitesimal at the service of memory."
(Louise Martin Papasian - FIDMarseille)