Retratos de identificaçao

Among the many victims of the military dictatorship that raged in Brazil from 1964 to 1985, a small group of guerilla fighters – Chael, Roberto, Reinaldo and Dora – got arrested, tortured, some of them killed or forced into exile. Before and after their arrest, during their torture sessions, the police photographed them. Together with the official reports, these photos are the material Anita Leandro worked on from the inside to bring these four people’s fate out of oblivion. Watching, repressing, torturing, collecting information, such was the task of the police, which created archives. Showing, repeating, cropping, overexposing, juxtaposing, double exposing these archives, such is the task of the filmmaker, so as to reclaim history, and to free the archives from a one-way discourse. Anita Leandro uses editing to make images talk about those who where actually tortured to talk, and she does so with restraint, never undermining the emotional force of the photographs. Besides her work on archives, she uses an almost performative process that contributes to the polyphony of the tale. Indeed, two fighters see their police photographs for the first time and start to tell their stories. Their voices mix up with that of Dora, who is filmed during her exile in Chile. Through her tragic fate as a runaway guerilla soldier, the lives broken by all past and present dictatorships finally get a chance to resurface. (CG)