My Own Private Hell

Co-directed by Guto Parente and Pedro Diogenes, this 2018 Brazilian film takes place in a run-down bar called Inferninho. Deusimar, who owns it, wants to leave and get somewhere far away. Falling in love with Jarbas, a sailor who comes into the bar, turns that wish into an actual plan. The film was shot almost entirely in one location, and that location is not realistic. The set is plainly theatrical: painted walls, coloured light, the outside never shown. The choice moves the film into the space of a fable and makes visible the distance between the characters' dreams and their actual situations. The regulars form a kind of chosen family: queer characters, the unemployed, people in flight. The film neither exoticises them nor romanticises their solidarity. It belongs to the wave of independent cinema out of Ceara in the north-east of Brazil. Who it's for: those who like low-budget, formally bold Latin American cinema. Who it's not for: viewers expecting realistic telling and setting; the film uses artifice as a deliberate tool.