Girimunho: Life Imagined in the Backlands of Minas Gerais
Girimunho, Helvecio Marins Jr. & Clarissa Campolina (2011)
In a barely lit room, with a beat-up wall, the regular noise of a hammer on a piece of iron, or maybe a horseshoe, punctuates an ominous score. The camera cuts to an upset Bastú (Maria Sebastiana Alves) who talks to her never-seen and always-present deceased husband. She complains that now that he is dead, all he does is work in his workshop: the narrow room in a clay house they shared for so long. She is a bright figure in mostly dim surroundings. Bastú, her arms crossed over her waist, complains to Feliciano that he has no power over her or the house anymore. She commands him to go, packing all his tools and clothing. When she is done, she pulls a chair outdoors and stares into the night. Branca arrives and asks, "Grandma, what are you doing out here, in the dew?" Bastú responds, "Imagining life."
Girimunho, the visually stunning opera prima from Clarissa Campolina and Helvécio Marins Jr. unapologetically explores existential concerns in a little town called São Romão, in the backlands of Minas Gerais. Bastú lives there, as does her friend Maria, who fiercely preserves her people's culture through drum-playing and singing. The film somehow wanders through the lives of both friends, interlocking their experiences to the geographical and human landscape of São Romão.
Interested in the little details that assemble any life, Girimunho recreates the meaning of these women's journeys through both of their experiences—an essential part being the presence of those things we come across as inexplicable. One, for sure, are the meaning and limitations of what we all understand as life. As the scene above demonstrates, people may not truly leave when they die. They are still part of our daily life, in all their oddities and pettiness. And perhaps, it is even easier to settle the score with those late loved-ones now than when they were alive.
Girimunho, Helvecio Marins Jr. & Clarissa Campolina (2011)
Girimunho does not play the old tune of Latin American magical realism. Like many other productions originating from Teia, the Brazilian artists' collective, this film asks the public to leave behind their biases and predetermined ideas about time, history, and storytelling. The landscape of the region— with its desert, rivers, over-bright days and very dark nights— works as a perfect misce-èn-scene for this crisscrossing between the living and the dead.
For Campolina and Marins Jr., to chronicle means to embrace all the layers that compound and shape the experience of living. Felipe Bragança’s script for Girimunho densifies that trait already present in his own films A alegria (The Joy, Bragança and Mariana Meliande, 2010) and Não devore meu coração (Don’t Swallow My Heart Alligator Girl, 2017). The question becomes, how to answer the pervasive and painful individual and collective questions we have without resorting to superficially invisible, hidden, or illogical conclusions? Does that process reveal itself as more absurd than the world itself?
Girimunho, Helvecio Marins Jr. & Clarissa Campolina (2011)
Memory—both collective and personal—is also an essential thread explored in Teia productions. In their short, Trecho, Campolina and Marins Jr. explore the journey of a man named Libério, who in 1996 walked from Belo Horizonte to Recife, in the northeast state of Pernambuco. The memories of the character are transformed by the passage of time, by the landscape, and the experience of the film itself.
In that regard, the remarkable short O Porto, which premiered in several international festivals, utilizes outstanding visuals and sound to chronicle the historical transformations of Rio de Janeiro's port—from an archeological site of the arrival of millions of slaves to a central space for carnival festivities, to an area of commerce, to a privileged place of gentrification on the verge of the 2016 Olympics.
O Porto subtly explores collective memory and amnesia. What does it mean to "beautify" a space where slave trade occurred in a sidereal scale? How to preserve the memory of that experience? Images are imprecise; blurry. They are superimposed, layered to convey the different landscapes and symbols of the port: a site of recreation, public celebration, exploitation. In that regard, all possible meanings imposed on a single space that is so symbolically significant evince a magical, hallucinatory, and obscure spirit.
Girimunho, Helvecio Marins Jr. & Clarissa Campolina (2011)