Here's an intriguing and curious short film that talks with subtlety and sobriety about the queer experience. Writer/director Karim Aïnouz
talks about the attitudes from old ladies of his own family (grandmothers, aunts and such) when it comes to talk about past experiences, relationships
and how certain men and women were viewed back in many years ago and with those stories Karim chronicles a little about growing up as a gay man living
in a society full of prejudices. He makes an interesting juxtaposition of elements where the slightly nostalgic past from the women of his family
confronts the director's actual reality in the early 1990's - where it seems to us that he was never open about his sexuality with his family. Or that
he couldn't. I might be wrong with that, but the topic isn't brought on when he interviews the ladies.
So there's the interviews with the five women where he talks about marriage or lack of it, society's conventions are also discussed and it relates to
a friend of theirs who had a wild life of lovers (which wasn't seen with good eyes back in their younger days); and there's also some small fragments
where Karim narrates facts about Brazilian society and the terms used to describe gays, lesbians and how men should behave in society - of which he
criticizes because simply it reduces manhood in limited stereotypes. He's right about that.
The thing that fascinated me, far from the mentioned topics, is that he made this Brazilian short film as an exportation type of product. It's
mostly narrated in English and there's English captions when the women are being interviewed. I'm curious to know if it ever got an international
release and what people may think of Brazil and its relation with gay people. I've just watched recently and I'm dying to show it to foreign viewers
out there just to get some reaction, some thoughts. It was a genial piece of filmmaking where we can sense the time, the social structures and changes
over the decades.
I just wished the director could present more about himself and his own experiences about being gay and obstacles he faced so we could make a deeper analysis with everything that he's showing us. There's so little of him (his voice actually) and I wanted to know more about the amazing creator of "Madame Satã". 9/10.
