Unremember

The teenager Joana lives in Paris on a diet of literature and rock music. When an amnesty is declared in Brazil in 1979 she has to return with her family to a country she barely remembers. Back in the city where she was born and where her father was disappeared, she begins gathering the traces of a childhood left in pieces in Rio de Janeiro. Not everything she remembers is real and not all of it is imagined; the line between the two is unclear. As she remembers, she has to write her own story in the present tense. Flávia Castro’s ninety six minute Brazilian film is a fiction, but it rests on the fact that the director spent her own childhood and adolescence in exile, and it takes its title from a poem by Fernando Pessoa. Jeanne Boudier plays Joana, and the film premiered in the Horizons section of the 75th Venice Film Festival.