Strong Waters 2018

Directed by Mónica Baptista

A sensory, immersive composition takes us on a journey to a place that seems to have stopped in time but remains timeless. A female voice reads a mythological text on the origin of the world and sets the tone for a documentary-meditation on the presence of primeval elements – like water and flora – and their cohabitation with the natives, whose portraits intersperse the film. The stealthy camera follows a boat drifting across the calm waters of a river, as if the latter were the rings of a tree disclosing its history, in a movement that lulls us and drives us to the physical and metaphysical core. Finally, accompanied by an ancestral chant, the etching gives way to a sequence of images (which in turn emerge like a river reducing the field of action to the essential) and moves into a poetic terrain, summoning the imagination of each one.