Julia Seraphim

There’s something very beautiful about the way Feito Pipa presents Gugu (Yuri Gomes) to us. Even before the world tries to tell him who he should be, the film makes a point of showing him who he is. Stickers, necklaces, makeup, a superhero cape on his shoulders, and a bicycle to take him around. Gugu plays soccer, dances with his friends, dresses up, and seems to exist without needing to choose a single version of himself. There’s an almost absolute freedom in that boy. When his grandmother asks where he’s going, the answer comes with the conviction that only a child wearing a cape could have: “I’m going to save the world.”

Perhaps it’s precisely because we know Gugu in this way that it hurts so much to follow what happens next.

Directed by Alan Deberton and written by André Araújo, Feito Pipa understands the world of childhood very well and, especially, the violence that exists when adults begin to interfere in it. Gugu is raised by his grandmother, Dilma (Teca Pereira), since his mother’s death. More than a grandmother, she is his friend, accomplice, and safe haven. It is beside her that he finds space to simply be. The two protect each other, although, little by little, this relationship begins to reverse.

First, there are small lapses in memory. Dilma puts her cell phone in the microwave, confuses things, loses information that previously seemed trivial. “I’m fine, Gugu. Just a little forgetful,” she says. What initially still fits within the playful gaze of children takes on another dimension. Gugu and his friends try to help as best they can: they invent games, play memory games, heat water, even create a prayer. There is a purity in these attempts precisely because they do not yet understand the true dimension of what is to come.

But Gugu understands too soon.

Gradually, he stops being just a grandson and begins to assume responsibilities that should never belong to a child. He needs to take care of the house, pay the electricity bill, get food, study, and take care of his grandmother. In one of the most painful moments, he even pretends to be his own mother to comfort her. Until Dilma forgets about him too.

That’s when Feito Pipa finds one of his most painful ideas: Gugu experiences grief even without his grandmother’s death. He loses Dilma little by little, but he also begins to lose the life that existed around her. The house, the routine, the bicycle, the friends, and, above all, the freedom to be who he is. If at the beginning he seemed invincible even in the face of prejudice, it’s because there was a place to return to. When that place disappears, his armor begins to disappear along with it.

Unable to continue living with his grandmother, Gugu goes to live with his father, Batista (Lázaro Ramos), and the change represents more than just a change of house. It’s as if he crossed a border between two worlds. While there was acceptance with Dilma, with Batista there is a constant attempt at correction.

The father wants Gugu to conform to what he understands a boy should be. He encourages soccer, tries to control his appearance, and even questions him: “Do you want to be a soccer player or a clown?” The most interesting thing is that Batista himself exposes the contradictions of this masculinity that he tries to impose on his son. He doesn’t even like soccer and enjoys cooking, an activity historically associated with the feminine at home, but still seems to need to fit Gugu into a rigid idea of ​​what he considers acceptable.

At no point is it necessary to define that boy’s sexuality. Gugu is a child. What exists is a child discovering his tastes and building his identity, while the adults around him project fears and prejudices that shouldn’t even be part of his world yet.

And perhaps this is one of the most disturbing forms of violence in the film. Batista doesn’t need to know who Gugu will be in the future to fear him. He only needs to perceive any possibility of difference in his son. In trying to protect him from the judgment of others—or perhaps to protect himself from the shame he feels in the face of that judgment—he ends up becoming precisely the one who most restricts his freedom.

The difference between the treatment given to Gugu and his daughter makes this even more evident. For her, there seems to be space to simply be; for him, every gesture can become something to be corrected.

The transformation also happens visually. The boy we know covered in accessories, riding a bicycle and carrying a superhero cape begins to be dressed in his father’s image. It’s not just a change of clothes. Gradually, it seems they are erasing everything that the film insisted on presenting to us at the beginning.

That’s why the bicycle, the cape, and especially the kite carry such a beautiful meaning within the narrative. They are images of movement and freedom. The kite only fully exists when it can take to the sky, even if it remains connected to someone by a string. Gugu also needs this space. He needs bonds that don’t function as shackles.

The arid photography of the Ceará backlands contrasts with the vivacity of this protagonist and with a soundtrack that ranges from Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” to Pabllo Vittar. There is color, music, and imagination traversing a dry landscape, as if Gugu himself insisted on coloring a world that repeatedly tries to make him smaller.

Perhaps that’s why a seemingly simple phrase carries so much weight when he says: “I’m not sad, I’m just angry.” Because there is something profoundly unfair in watching a child need to find words for feelings caused by problems that should belong to adults.

Feito Pipa talks about prejudice, but what struck me most was realizing how this prejudice manages to invade precisely what should be protected from it: childhood. Gugu begins the film believing he can save the world. And perhaps the most painful thing is realizing that, throughout the story, it is the adults who should be concerned with saving the world for him.

Selected to represent Brazil in the race for a 2027 Oscar nomination for Best International Film, Feito Pipa will have its first screening in Rio de Janeiro today, October 6, during the Festival do Rio. The gala session will take place at the FGV Cultural Center in Botafogo, within the Première Brasil section, and will be attended by director Alan Deberton and the cast, including Yuri Gomes, Lázaro Ramos, and Teca Pereira.

After tonight’s screening, the film will have five more screenings at the Festival do Rio, between October 8 and 14. The theatrical release throughout Brazil is scheduled for November 5.

You can find Feito Pipa at Festival do Rio.
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There is a considerable distance between dreaming and having the means to sustain a dream. Funk, Aly Muritiba’s new feature film, seems particularly interested in this space: the place where desire, money, identity, and survival intertwine.

In competition at the Première Brasil section of the 2026 Rio Film Festival, the musical drama follows Sabrina (Duda Santos), a young woman from Morro dos Prazeres who wants to make funk her life. Daughter of Priscila (MC Neném), a funk singer who has already experienced her own moment of recognition, Sabrina knows where she intends to go. What she doesn’t yet know is how much of herself will be demanded to remain on stage.

Before any success, however, there is life. Sabrina needs to work, pay the bills, endure insults, face racism, and still find the energy to believe that someone will notice her talent and offer her an opportunity. There is something very true in this dimension of the film: dreaming also costs money. For those who are not born surrounded by advantages, it is not enough to possess talent. It is necessary to be able to sustain it.

“You know what I want? I want to celebrate my freedom.”
This freedom also extends to the body and the right to desire. By entering the world of explicit funk music, the film finds one of its most interesting provocations. Sabrina reclaims a sexual language that is accepted naturally when it comes from men, but constantly policed ​​when it comes from women. “Explicit funk is freedom, but also love,” she says. Pleasure and affection don’t have to be on opposite sides.

But this freedom constantly encounters limits. Sabrina faces racism at work, questions the pay gap between men and women, and lives with police violence and other powers that determine how marginalized bodies can move around.That’s why the Rio that appears in Funk interested me so much.

The film doesn’t reduce the city to the favela or the baile funk, much less to the postcard image. There’s beach, soccer, workers, parties, friends, and a city lived by those who need to cross it every day.

The cinematography is one of the aspects that most catches the eye. At various moments, it took me to a certain Brazilian visual imaginary of the 2000s, something between the energy of City of God and the popular aesthetics of Hurricane 2000. Not as a copy, but through the texture, the lights, and the way of finding beauty in that universe. The soundtrack and editing help maintain this pulse.

This is directly related to an idea defended by the team: not simply making a film about funk, but a film with funk. The difference is important. The genre isn’t just a subject. It’s in the costumes, the choreography, the language, the bodies, and the very aesthetic construction of the film. Muritiba even compared his creative process to the use of samples, gathering references from photographs, music videos, and home recordings to build something unique and real.

Duda Santos carries this energy well. Her Sabrina is hungry to get to the next level. She wants the stage, money, recognition, and freedom. And it’s precisely when she starts to achieve all of that that the film finds its most interesting contradiction.

By replacing her friend Raíssa (Lellê), who managed her career, with a manager capable of taking her to another level, Sabrina gains structure, reach, and a more polished image. But this polishing begins to look like sanitization. The more the industry realizes her commercial potential, the more it tries to trim precisely what made her unique.

Sabrina finally manages to be seen. The question becomes: who are they seeing when they look at her?

Raíssa may be an inexperienced businesswoman, who makes mistakes and learns in practice how that market works, but she knows Sabrina before she knows the product. There is something interesting even in the affective sense of the word “amateur”: she is there also because she loves her friend. The subsequent professionalization offers efficiency, but it comes at a different price.

At home, there is also the difficult relationship with Priscila. Sabrina demands a mother that she feels she didn’t have, while Priscila observes her daughter’s ambition with the experience of someone who has already known some version of that dream and its disappointments. Between the two, there is pride, resentment, admiration, and love, even when neither knows exactly how to demonstrate it.

But perhaps Sabrina needs to travel this entire path to finally understand what she couldn’t see at the beginning.
She spends a good part of the film looking ahead. The future means success, money, stage, and recognition; the past seems to represent everything she needs to overcome. Until she achieves her dream and discovers that it wasn’t exactly as she had imagined.

You have to arrive to realize what was left behind.
Thus, Funk ceases to be just a story about a young woman from the periphery who wants to succeed in music. It is also a film about belonging and about the risk of conquering a space that demands, in exchange, the abandonment of what made you get there.

Sabrina spends so much time looking for a better version of herself in the future that she almost loses sight of who she always was. Her journey is precisely about recovering that identity—her friends, her mother, the favela, her language, her desire—without it meaning giving up on moving forward.

Because perhaps the true freedom that Sabrina seeks isn’t just about getting on stage. It’s about being able to occupy it without having to disappear.

You can find Funk on Festival do Rio.

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Verity transforms the house into a witness to a story in which no one seems to tell the whole truth.

There’s a question that runs through Verity from the start: Who is the villain?

Directed by Michael Showalter and adapted from Colleen Hoover’s best-selling novel, Verity starts from a universe where the villain’s perspective matters. Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) built her career writing from this point of view, and perhaps that’s why, when the film begins to blur fiction and reality, truth and manipulation, it’s so difficult to know who to believe. Because, after all, everyone could be telling a story. And every story depends on who tells it.

Even before diving into this game, however, the film seems to make three introductions. First, the house. Then, Verity. And finally, Lowen. And it’s no coincidence that the house comes first.

There’s something about it that transcends the function of a setting. The Crawford property is as dark as the characters who inhabit it and, little by little, almost assumes the position of a silent witness. It was there. It was there that saw the different versions of that story unfold. If there is anyone capable of knowing the truth, perhaps it is precisely that house. The problem is that she can’t speak.

Verity appears in another time, at the height of her career, during an interview. Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), on the other hand, is introduced in the present, in an almost opposite situation: she is in a bookstore for the launch of her book, but practically no one seems to be there for her. She is a struggling writer, without an audience and in need of money. Curiously, shortly after, Lowen says she likes being invisible.
And that phrase remains.

Because the question remains: does her lack of success stem solely from a lack of opportunities, or is there some comfort in this invisibility?

It is precisely this woman who will receive an opportunity capable of changing her life. After an unlikely encounter with Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett), Verity’s husband, Lowen is hired to finish the writer’s book series, now unable to write. There is an evident financial need; her mother’s death left debts, but there is also the possibility of finally approaching the recognition she never had.

But there is an interesting contradiction in this: to be recognized, Lowen needs to disappear. As a ghostwriter, her job requires her to write as someone else. It’s not enough to simply finish a story. She needs to find Verity’s voice, reproduce her rhythm, understand her logic, and deliver to readers what they expect from that author. To write as Verity, therefore, Lowen needs to get inside her head. And that’s exactly where Verity starts to become more interesting.

On the family’s isolated property in Vermont, Lowen comes to know not only the work of a writer he had never even read until then, but the fragments of a life marked by tragedy. Among books, drafts and notes, she finds what appears to be Verity’s autobiographical manuscript. And, as you read, the question stops being just what happened in that house and becomes something else: Who is Verity?

Is she the woman in those writings? Is it as disturbing as the characters you created? Is the manuscript a confession, a literary exercise, or something in between?

Michael Showalter builds much of the suspense precisely in this space of uncertainty. The film puts us inside Verity’s head through Lowen’s eyes, but never offers enough security to know whether what we see belongs to reality, writing or the imagination of the person reading. It is in this aspect that photography and editing become fundamental.

The house is surrounded by nature and, at the same time, seems to allow this nature to invade its interiors. There is glass everywhere, large transparent surfaces, an architecture that creates the impression that everything can be seen. It’s a particularly interesting choice for a story built around that which remains hidden. The more transparent the house appears, the less we can see what really happened inside it.

This feeling also appears in the way the images are organized. Verity works with overlaps, parallels and images that coexist within the frame. When Lowen reads, the words can invade the screen; While accessing the reports, what we imagine takes shape before us. Present and past begin to occupy the same visual space. Reading stops being just an action and becomes an image. And there is a danger there: we too begin to see as Lowen sees.

The montage doesn’t simply present an objective past. It materializes a version of that past. As Lowen delves into Verity’s writing, the viewer dives in along with her and begins to lose the ability to separate what happened from what was written, and what was written from what was imagined.

The soundtrack reinforces this instability and the constant feeling that someone is watching. There’s something in that house that never allows Lowen, and consequently the viewer, to be completely comfortable.

It is in this environment that Anne Hathaway encounters perhaps one of the film’s most curious challenges. For much of the narrative, Verity is in a wheelchair, seemingly catatonic. Doctors speak of involuntary movements and little chance of recovery. Hathaway, therefore, needs to build presence precisely through the absence of movement and words. And yet someone is there.

A look, a small change, a gesture that may have happened; or perhaps not. The interpretation works because it forces us to observe Verity with the same obsession as Lowen. We look for signs in that body. We try to discover if there was intention where apparently there should be none. And, at a certain point, we no longer know if we are really seeing these signs or if, like Lowen, we have begun to want to find them.

Dakota Johnson functions as our path into this labyrinth. Lowen arrives at the house as an observer, but observing is never a completely neutral gesture. The more she gets to know Verity, the closer she gets to her life, her writing, and Jeremy. And, little by little, the boundaries begin to blur. Perhaps that is why the idea of ​​repetition becomes so unsettling.

In entering Verity’s mind to be able to write like her, to what extent does Lowen remain Lowen? How much identification, how much projection, and how much desire exists in this approach? At some point, knowing another person’s story can also mean beginning to occupy their place?

Verity finds her strength precisely when she doesn’t immediately answer the questions she creates. Fiction and reality, manipulation and attraction, opportunity and obsession begin to exist too close to one another. And, when each character can carry their own version of events, the truth ceases to be a certainty and becomes a dispute. Perhaps that’s why the house is such an important presence.

While everyone talks, writes, remembers, imagines, or hides, it remains there. Silent. It watched Verity before Lowen arrived, observes Lowen trying to understand her, and holds within itself events that we only know through other people’s versions. In the end, we return to the initial question: who is the villain?
Perhaps Verity’s unease lies precisely in realizing that, before answering, it is necessary to decide which story we are willing to believe.

You can find Verity in theaters starting today.
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Virtuous transforms the search for the perfect woman into a terrifyingly realistic horror

There is something particularly disturbing in a horror film when what should provoke strangeness seems too familiar. In Virtuous, the new feature film by Cíntia Domit Bittar, the horror is born precisely from this proximity. By delving into the universe of trad wives, the so-called traditional wives who gained strength on social media by defending a femininity based on submission, marriage, motherhood, and certain interpretations of biblical precepts, the film constructs a biting satire about women who seek to achieve an ideal of perfection that may not even exist.

Virtuous follows three women selected to participate in an exclusive retreat led by the admirable and inspiring Virgínia Heinzel, played by Bruna Linzmeyer. The promise is tempting for those who believe in that universe: an immersion capable of teaching them to become better women, wives, and mothers. What begins as an experience of personal improvement, however, gradually takes on disturbing contours and transforms that journey into something terrifying.

The screenplay, written by Cíntia Domit Bittar and Fernanda Capua, finds particularly fertile ground in the trad wives movement because it doesn’t limit itself to ridiculing its characters. There are different relationships with that discourse.
During the retreat, the women learn what supposedly constitutes an exemplary wife. It’s necessary to wake up early, prepare food and the husband’s lunchbox, know the correct arrangement of elements on a table, take care of the house, the family, pray, and understand their role within the marriage. The man provides and protects; the woman cares. Family moments are sacred.

But, faced with so many rules about how to care for others, a question begins to run through the film: when do these women take care of themselves?
Submission also becomes a curiously more complex discussion than it initially seems. At a certain point, the argument arises that we are all submissive to something. We are submissive to work, to bosses, to feelings, to expectations, and to people. This realization provokes an interesting break in the automatic rejection of the word “submission.” Ultimately, in some way, we are constantly subjected to structures that organize our lives.

The film, however, leads this reflection to another question: does recognizing that we all submit to something mean that a woman should deliberately choose submission to her husband?

This ability to start from a statement that contains some truth to reveal the consequences of the conclusion built from it is one of the characteristics that makes Virtuosas more intelligent than a simple satire.
And its intelligence is not only in the dialogues.
Perhaps one of the most interesting layers of the film lies precisely in the choices made around the story. Casting Bruna Linzmeyer to occupy a central position within a universe that preaches an extremely specific model of femininity creates, in itself, a provocative contradiction between character, interpreter, and discourse. The same happens when other figures publicly associated with discourses very different from those defended by the characters appear in that environment.

The location also seems to participate in the joke. Using a house associated with the recordings of a program marked by a very different representation of behavior, desire, and relationships, as a space for a retreat intended to manufacture “better women” is an irony that hardly goes unnoticed. In Virtuosas, setting and cast do not function merely as technical elements: they become part of the commentary.

That is precisely why the film seems to be built in layers. There’s what the characters say, what they do when they’re being watched, and what they reveal when they believe no one is looking.

From then on, the very idea of ​​virtue begins to be questioned.
Does being virtuous mean following a list of behaviors? Does attending church, praying, and publicly defending certain values ​​necessarily make someone a virtuous person? What happens when the discourse of love, family, and morality coexists with violence, cruelty, and a lack of empathy?

Virtuous Women doesn’t seem interested in attacking faith itself, but in observing what happens when it becomes an instrument of control and a performance of moral superiority. There is a huge difference between believing and using belief as authorization to control other people’s lives – and the film finds its horror precisely in this space.

Then another uncomfortable question arises: are these women really what they teach other women to be?
It is in this distance between discourse and practice that the acidic humor of Virtuous Women finds terror.

More than scaring through the traditional mechanisms of the genre, the film disturbs because of the possibility of recognizing its discourses outside the movie theater. The horror lies in realizing how far someone can feel entitled to go when they believe they are acting in the name of God, family, or morality.

When a conviction ceases to guide one’s own life and begins to justify what is imposed on others, the consequences can be far more frightening than any supernatural element.
In the end, perhaps the most interesting provocation lies precisely in the title.

Who are the virtuous women, after all?

 

Sometimes I don’t feel qualified to talk about this film because it stirred so many feelings in me and is composed of so many layers. So, let’s get to my impressions, my thoughts, based 100% on my feelings.

I wasn’t familiar with Jane Schoenbrun’s films. I went to the cinema unprepared, knowing only the synopsis. Of course, when I left the cinema, the film immediately became my hyperfocus, and I researched everything about it.

To begin with, the film stars Hannah Einbinder, who plays Kris, and Gillian Anderson, who plays Billy Preston. I’ve been following Gillian’s work for some time. I watched Sex Education, Hannibal, and was a fan of The Fall.

But, back to Camp Miasma…

This film brings together much of what I grew up watching.

First, the slasher, which has always been the genre I liked most within horror. Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Psycho, Halloween… And I’d even extend that to the 90s and 2000s, including Cry Wolf, Final Destination, and so many others.

I know many of these films have major problematic themes. But sometimes, I feel like little Kris in front of the TV.

Because I also watched these films as a child, within my innocent and childlike imagination. And I liked the freedom they portrayed. The parties, the fun, the various friends together, high school, college. For me, as a child, that was all an imaginary world of what the adult world would be like.

And it seemed cool.

But there’s another layer in Camp Miasma that also took me back to childhood and, especially, adolescence: the old queer films from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s.

It was this cinema that formed part of my imagination. It began to awaken my sexuality, as a woman who was recognizing and discovering herself.

And Schoenbrun goes even further, bringing another love of mine for cinema: metalanguage.

It’s a film within a film. It’s a way of revering cinema itself. The film reel, the cinema as a physical space, and, above all, a screenwriter and director who wants to make a film, wants to tell her story, but has her creative freedom curtailed by agents and producers who aim for profit and the repetition of formulas that have worked before.

Camp Miasma brings so many references that it seems that each scene was designed to converse with something.

Starting with the opening.

The editing is extremely intelligent because, in a few minutes, it contextualizes exactly the universe that Camp Miasma wants to talk about. We see a franchise being exploited and saturated until it loses its own audience. It’s a very clear critique of what Kris calls “zombie intellectual properties”: sequels, prequels, continuations, spin-offs, the endless exploitation of the same universe.

As we see happening with Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Chucky, the Halloween franchise…

When Kris arrives at the camp that has become Billy’s home, the film’s atmosphere changes. And other references begin to appear.

I immediately think of Carol.

The snow. The Christmas tree. The glove. The atmosphere that slowly builds between those two women.

Until the preparation for that romantic night, to the sound of Sade’s Ordinary Love.

For me, that’s the peak of these references.

And the dialogues are also very intelligent. The film begins to reflect on the very way films are greenlit, on who can continue telling stories and who the industry decides to leave behind.

There’s a moment when they tell Kris that Billy could never star in the film again simply because he’s aged. And it’s impossible not to think about what this reveals about audiovisual media and the lack of older female protagonists, over 50, over 60 years old.

The soundtrack is another great success.

But, after all, how can I talk about a film where, for me, everything works?

Because I feel that Camp Miasma goes beyond creating reflections and debates about the film industry.

It touches on a much more intimate place.

On nostalgia for horror films. On nostalgia for queer films. On the memory of everything I watched and that, without realizing it, was shaping my imagination about cinema, about adult life, about freedom, desire, and about who I would become.

Perhaps that’s why this film affected me so deeply.

Because, somewhere, while I was watching Camp Miasma, I became that child again in front of the television.

And I feel that the child Julia, sitting in front of that screen, would have loved watching this film.

You can find Camp Miasma – Adolescence, Sex and Death in theaters.

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Krishnamurti: The Revolution of Silence is one of those films you don’t watch; you experience it. Directed by Françoise Ferraton, the documentary about the Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti invites the viewer to slow down, observe, and, above all, be silent. I left the theater in suspense. The film echoes more than it explains, and perhaps this is its greatest merit: it seeks not to convert, but to awaken.

The director uses archival footage, interviews, and readings from notebooks spanning from 1961 to 1984, the year of the thinker’s last diary. The structure is simple, almost transparent, because at the center of everything is Krishnamurti’s voice; a calm, lucid voice that seems to traverse time and whisper to the present. He speaks about the power of observation, about how consciousness contains within itself human suffering. Not just personal suffering, but that of all humanity.

The film begins with the fluidity of a river. And it is precisely in this rhythm that Ferraton guides the narrative, a flow of images, people, nature. Gradually, the water gives way to earth, and contemplation becomes a mirror. Krishnamurti said that “to be free is to observe without judgment,” and the documentary seems to film exactly that: the gaze that frees itself from haste, from opinion, from the need to be right.

But it is impossible to emerge unscathed. The truth, here, becomes suffocating. The images of exhausted immigrants, families crossing borders in search of shelter, people without land, without homes, without countries, all fleeing war and famine, embody the collective suffering that Krishnamurti speaks of. It is the visible portrait of a sickened human consciousness. The silence he proposes is not an escape, it is a confrontation. It is an invitation to see human chaos without reacting with more noise, without trying to heal the world before looking at what is within us. The documentary traces his journey, from his youth in theosophical school to life in England and then in California, where he lived his final years. But more than a biography, The Silent Revolution is a state of mind. The film doesn’t try to explain Krishnamurti; it tries to feel with him.

Among the reflections, one phrase remains: “Compassion is freedom. And compassion means the end of suffering.” It’s simple and devastating. To be free, after all, is to cease the search. It’s to accept that perhaps the true revolution is internal, invisible, and silent. Krishnamurti: The Silent Revolution is a rare reminder that thinking isn’t always understanding, sometimes it’s just breathing. And in that breath, something changes.

You can find Krishnamurti at Festival do Rio.
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If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You is one of those films everyone needs to see. I left the screening at the Rio Film Festival shocked, and it took me days to digest everything Mary Bronstein builds here. It’s a film that pierces you—not by shouting, but by exposing with precision and irony what it means to be a woman (and mother) in a state of collapse.

Mary Bronstein doesn’t just film a woman on the verge of collapse—she films the collapse itself. In If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, Rose Byrne plays Linda, a mother, psychologist, and survivor of a daily life that seems to conspire against her. The ceiling literally collapses, and the metaphor couldn’t be more obvious—and more painfully real. After water floods the apartment, Linda is forced to move to a motel with her sick daughter. Her husband is always absent, her therapist seems more interested in provoking her than helping her, and the whole world seems to demand balance when all she needs is five minutes of silence. Life falls apart in slow motion—and somehow, she still has to cope.

The film, distributed by A24, is a dark comedy that feels like a domestic nightmare. Mary Bronstein films the chaos with surgical precision: the close-ups, the suffocating close-ups, the frames that cut through the air. The visual absence of her daughter—who appears only with a fragmented body, feet, hands, and ears—is a brilliant gesture. The child exists, but the focus is on the mother, and that changes everything. If we saw the girl completely, we might forget to look at Linda—and that is precisely what the film is about: the woman who disappears behind the role of mother.

Rose Byrne is monumental. Winner of the Silver Bear for Best Actress in Berlin, she balances exhaustion, despair, and irony with a delivery that seems to emerge from a trance. In her every expression, there’s guilt and resistance, shame and love. Byrne doesn’t play the “good mother”—she plays the real woman, who wants to love but also wants to escape. Who loves silence as much as she fears loneliness. Bronstein’s script, at once cruel and funny, has a humor born from the absurdity of routine. “If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You” isn’t just a provocative title—it’s a muffled cry from all the women trying to sustain a home, a job, a child, and their own sanity.

The director plays with genres: there’s drama, there’s comedy, there’s a light psychological thriller tone. And amidst it all, a stark portrait of contemporary motherhood emerges—a motherhood riddled with guilt, shame, and exhaustion. The perfect mother is a fiction as dangerous as the ceiling that threatens to collapse. The film asks a silent question: are we all born to be mothers? And an even more uncomfortable statement: being a woman is, in itself, a form of resistance.
In the end, “If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You” leaves a feeling that lingers in your body. It’s impossible to leave feeling the same. Because after watching Linda, you’ll never look at your mother—or yourself—the same way again.

You’ll find “If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You” at the Rio Festival.
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In Elisa , Leonardo Di Costanzo delves into the darkest corners of the human mind, that place where guilt and denial merge with survival. Inspired by a true story, the film is a co-production between Italy and Switzerland and follows Elisa, a 35-year-old woman imprisoned for over a decade for a brutal crime: killing and burning her own sister’s body. She claims to remember nothing. And perhaps that’s the only truth possible.

The director constructs a psychological drama that moves slowly, sometimes too slowly, but with purpose. Nothing is gratuitous. Silence speaks as much as speech, and Elisa’s gaze carries more questions than answers. By agreeing to participate in the research of renowned criminologist Alaoui—a specialist in family crimes—she finds herself forced to revisit what she fears most: her own memory.
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ittle by little, fragments of the past emerge. A childhood marked by rejection; a mother who claimed she hadn’t loved her, a seemingly structured but emotionally devastated environment. Elisa grew up without affection, repressing her feelings until her anger became confused with fear. And when her fear overflowed, the crime occurred. She simply can’t face the reflection of what she was capable of doing.

The film proposes an uncomfortable reflection: what is guilt, after all? A moral burden, an instinct for self-protection, or just the name we give to that which we don’t know how to process? Costanzo articulates all of this through the sessions with Alaoui, who sees the criminal not as a monster, but as a human being, imperfect, flawed, and yet capable of redemption.

There is a stark contrast between the two examples of forgiveness presented: the father who visits his daughter twice a week in the penitentiary, and the mother in another case, who lost her son to murder and remains a prisoner of her own grief. One forgives the unforgivable; the other cannot survive hatred. Between them, the viewer is placed before a mirror, and the film asks: would you forgive a criminal?

The cold, almost clinical cinematography reinforces this distance between what is remembered and what is repressed. Elisa – The Veil of Guilt is a film about memory and denial, but also about humanity, about what remains when the punishment has been served, but forgiveness has not yet arrived.
Costanzo understands that looking at the past is the true prison. And perhaps forgiveness—of others and of oneself—is the only possible way out.

You can find Elisa – The Veil of Guilt at the Rio Film Festival.
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Since Tá e Fala Comigo, Felipe Sholl has been honing his own perspective on desire and affection. In Streets of Glory, this growing focus is confirmed—the director seems more relaxed, more courageous, and finally comfortable filming what many still avoid: the body, the taboo, the void. It’s a film that breathes the chaos of Rio at night, amidst sweat, light, and the lack thereof.

Gabriel (Caio Macedo) arrives in the city after his grandmother’s death, trying to find life where before there was only routine. A history professor, he becomes an observer and participant in what he researches: the men who sell pleasure and survive on the desires of others. Until he meets Adriano (Alejandro Claveaux), a Uruguayan male prostitute who becomes his escape—and downfall. What begins as curiosity becomes dependence; love, here, is a risky experience.

Felipe Sholl films the city as an emotional extension of the characters. The streets of Glória, Lapa, and Cinelândia are not just settings, they are states of mind. There’s always something pulsing—a siren, party music, a passing body. The use of handheld camera and anamorphic lens zooms in, compresses, and creates a sense of urgency. The exception is the mirror scene—the turning point, when the lens closes and Gabriel’s world closes in.

The relationship between Gabriel and Adriano is intense and restless, made of presence and absence. Caio Macedo delivers a delicate performance, built on gaze, hesitation, and restrained surrender. Alejandro Claveaux balances vulnerability and mystery, avoiding the caricature of either the “savior” or the “lost.” The chemistry between the two is raw, unpredictable, almost dangerous.

With a score that ranges from Letrux to silence, the film moves between documentary and delirium. Sex work, grief, and addiction appear not as a shock, but as a consequence of a body that yearns to feel—and of an affection that sometimes hurts more than it heals.

Ruas da Glória is a portrait of love and its disasters. Of the loneliness that not even the other’s body can resolve. Of the city that continues to live while we fall apart inside. Felipe Sholl films with courage and intimacy, transforming Rio’s nocturnal chaos into a mirror of what we still try to understand within ourselves.

You can find Ruas da Glória at Festival do Rio.
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