Saudades Eternas

Saudades Eternas is a film that overflows. With music, with shouts, with laughter and with gunfire. A blazing hymn to life, sung where it is forever at its most precarious. For in Chapéu Mangueira, a favela clinging to the heights of Rio de Janeiro, death is palpable: a war rages between traffickers and the special police. In the distance, just out of shot, lies the idyllic Copacabana Beach. Yet we remain inside the house, both shelter and prison. In the centre of the frame, Sueli. Larger than life, flamboyant, volcanic, tender, yet also uneasy. She tends to her family, her neighbours, the atmosphere and the crumbling walls. Within the confined space of this singular home, the filmmaker remarkably finds her place. Physically, she navigates between a surfboard leaning against a fridge and an oversized speaker; emotionally, she earns the trust of a family who opens up without reservation, most memorably in a sublime shadow-play scene, one night, in their bedroom. An incandescent, profoundly human film which, rather than merely showing us life, makes us hear, feel and love it.

Anne Delseth