After a first collaboration earlier this year, focusing on the cinema of Adirley Queiros and Joana Pimenta, the Regards Satellites festival (April 3-7) once again invites FIDMarseille, featuring Baronesa by Juliana Antunes (FID 2017), with the director and Cyril Neyrat, artistic director of FID, in attendance.

BARONESA
Juliana Antunes 
Brazil | 2017 | 70'
International Competition 2017

On the outskirts of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, the favelas bear women’s names. It is in the Juliana neighborhood that the director and her almost entirely female crew settle to film two friends, Leidiane and Andreia, at the moment when the latter prepares to leave Juliana for its namesake neighbor, Baronesa. Far from any sociological endeavor, Juliana Antunes shows us the favela as it is rarely seen: from the women’s side, in the backyards of makeshift homes, separated by low walls and sheets of metal from a gang war that is never shown but whose violence seeps into the daily life and fate of the protagonists. With an absolutely stripped-down setting, seemingly simple framing, direction, and editing — which nonetheless make use of the tools of fiction — everything is discreetly and subtly designed to let voices unfold. Drugs, violence, sex, love, friendship, death — everything is talked about. Through the course of the sequences, from seemingly trivial chatter to heart-wrenching confessions, and through the ellipses where the violence of these lives silently creeps in — along with the risk of stray bullets — the rough beauty of Andreia and Leidiane gradually emerges. The tough ones are not always who we think they are… Here, the men are like little boys, while the female characters, through a more complex cinematic gesture than it appears, gain a portrait full of contrast — one they are usually denied on screen.

Charlotte Garson

Screening in the presence of the director – presented by Cyril Neyrat.

Date: 6 April 2025 at 4:45 pm
Place: Cinéma l'Écran, Saint-Denis
14 Pass. de l'Aqueduc, 93200 Saint-Denis