Marcos Prado - Estamira (2004) :: top Movie Channel

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After her overwhelming share of life’s hardships, Estamira is diagnosed with schizophrenia. The protagonist of this documentary story is one of the homeless dwellers of Rio de Janeiro’s largest garbage dumps whose aristocratic spirit inhabits a realm of imaginary and dream visions.
Replicating the rare flickering moments of truth emerging in Estamira’s chaotic narratives of wild fantasy, the screen kaleidoscopes before the viewer’s eyes – color and gritty black-and-white shaping an unsentimental, although life-rumpled portrait of a 63-year old Brazilian.

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From the producer of Bus 174 (Festival 2003) comes another distinctive documentary of marginalised lives in a harsh Brazilian landscape where the poor and vulnerable are easily forgotten. Here Prado turns his camera onto 63-year-old Estamira, a schizophrenic mother of three whose traumatic past constructed from her anecdotes and commentaries displays a life beset by rape, infidelities and indifference. Solace now comes in the form of a living eked out on the giant Jardim Gramacho refuge heap where she salvages debris from the waste discarded by the society around her. Estamira harbours few illusions about the world but her commandments, missives, treatises, rants and raves provide a compelling commentary on her present, past and future. Aware of her demons and contradictions she is a wily prophet of the slums, a Mother Courage for our times whose story is both heartbreaking and impressively defiant. Juxtaposed with a commentary from her family that fills in some of the many gaps and questions that her story throws up, Prado crafts a poignant and refreshingly unsentimental portrait of a figure determined at all times 'to reveal the truth and nothing but the truth'.

Maria Delgado

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Thursday, June 24, 2010

Marcos Prado - Estamira (2004)

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