Essay on the film “Praia Formosa” by Julia De Simone
Introductory essay for a screening at Cinemateket of “Praia Formosa” (2024). This was part of the screening series “Når månen stiger ut av mørket”, curated by Brynjar Bjerkem (TrAP) and Hanan Benammar.
“Writer Toni Morrison said about her novel “Beloved” from 1987, that the way she dealt with the past was not about looking back, in retrospective. In that story the dead daughter of a freed slave mother seems to magically reappear in her life and she comes back to insist on the trauma within their relationship, mother and daughter. Morrison is making the point with this story that memory – and the past with a capital P - can come and sit down next to you at the dinner table.
These kinds of everyday links are all over “Praia Formosa”. And it’s not just to the memories of one life, but a whole array of different voices; it is the story of ancestors, mothers, sisters and lovers who reach through the fabrics of time and space. Not just through their physical bodies, genealogy and spirit, but also through the buildings, the architecture, the soundscape that is so meticulously arranged, the small artifacts that are found broken and dusty.
All these things form a philosophy of time in “Praia Formosa” as something like a spiral. Time in this movie is not linear, which is an intentional choice. It refutes the colonial logic of time rushing onward, unstoppable and fixed on finality and death, and instead reflects the world of our protagonist Muanza. Muanza is a woman born in what today is a part of Kongo, as part of a bantu clan who’s been taken to Rio De Janeiro to be sold as slaves. In bantu spirituality, time is a spiral braid in which the different parts are in movement and continuously touching other parts, a friction between now and everything that isn’t now. This is how Muanza is trying to reach the other main character of this movie: her spiritual sister Kieza. On their involuntary journey to Brazil, way out at sea, the two women develop a deep bond of love, affection and spiritual connection. After the two of them arrive and are bought for labor, Kieza decides to flee and wants Muanza to join her. Kieza flees and, for whatever reason, Muanza doesn’t.
This is the first moment in which the film comes to a standstill. Muanza lives in a house as a slave, she inhabits the old musty walls of a manor, serving the Portugese aristocrat Catarina who calls her Domingas. In this sequence, both of these women are in stasis; Muanza for not having escaped with Kieza, and Catarina for refusing to accept that her husband Felix will not return from his travels. It’s a strange chamber play, two women from Europe and Africa representing the elders of modern day Brazil, in a repetitive power play between one another. What I love about this sequence is that although it’s played out theatrically with stage lighting and costuming, the milieu is filmed as documentary; the building is shambled, no one’s lived there for many decades, there are broken doors all over and no one in the film crew has bothered to cover the graffiti on the walls. And in this scenario between the two women, the Portuguese aristocrat never moves on from her delusions, but Muanza is not of the same ilk. By keeping her senses open, her spiritual world intact and maintaining her promise to Kieza, she inevitably escapes.
What she encounters is what we as an audience will have already been watching in the film. In “Praia Formosa”, time is spiraling, and so we end up seeing the further folds in this story. I won’t say too much specifically about the second half of the film. But I will say that what Muanza discovers is that her desire is both her own, but also of the collective, kinship to other bantu people as timeless as herself and sensitive to how a community adapts and survives. She puts it this way: “Even if a tree falls over, if the roots are alive, they will sprout”.
Besides the story, what is central to the film is where it’s taking place. Director Julia De Simone has mostly been working with documentaries before making this movie, and I think you can sense that, especially at the beginning and end of the film. “Praia Formosa” is part of a kind of trilogy that’s based on Simone’s research around a specific port in Rio, called Cais Do Valongo. This is also part of the area that locals refer to as Pequena Africa, or “Little Africa”. During the massive construction the city did for the World Cup in 2014, the digging around Cais Do Valongo ended up unearthing vast amounts of old artefacts that had historical significance. And it’s these actual, physical layers of the port that this film is attempting to unravel. The abandoned house that we see is a part of this place. And there are other links too, but I’d like to not spoil the movie for you.
I’ll end by trying to highlight the relevance of the film. The decolonial gesture that the filmmakers are doing here is not just something we can find in the context of Rio, but also part of the history here in Scandinavia. And there are artists working with the colonial legacy that I encourage you to check out. One is Jeannette Ehlers, a Copenhagen-based artist who recently got to present the first public statue of a Black woman in Denmark, Mary Thomas of the St. Croix riots. And I also recommend works by my colleague Linda Gathu, a playwright and director who’s recently been presenting a play about the colonial legacy of Møhlenpris in Bergen, called “SUKKER”.”