Elogio da Graça
Joel Pizzini
Brazil | 2011 | 25 min
Language : Portuguese
Subtitles : English
This film tells the story of Maria Graça and the Swedish director Arne Sucksdorff, how they met to make a “photo-book” and their subsequent life together in the Mato Grosso. “Elogio da Graça was born of a meeting with Maria Graça in 2011, twenty years after our first interview in Cuaiaba, when the couple were struggling to prevent the destruction of the rain forest. Since the death of her partner, she has concentrated on cataloguing audiovisual material shot over a period of thirty years” (JP).
Maria Graça, Sucksdorff’s former muse, pays tribute to him in a confession mixing nostalgia and an insistence on their role as precursors of the green movement. Joel Pizzini – a filmmaker committed to defending the indigenous peoples of Amazonia – draws on the “Sucksdorff archives” and films Maria Graça in the unspoilt Brazilian environment. Like an uninterrupted conversation, an intimate relationship is established between past and present, ending with a touching sequence in which she reads a poem Sucksdorff wrote for her.
Carlo Chatrian
Translation BMP Translations