Mostra de Cinema de Tiradentes: Embracing Medusa and Medea and cumming together in a movie theater

With the publication of Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema , an article by Laura Mulvey conventionally considered the starting point of feminist criticism in 1973, the forms of objectification of women in cinema began to be challenged and subverted by female directors on screen. The hypersexualization of female bodies, scenically composed and arranged to appeal to a presumably cis-masculine and normative audience, became one of the main strategies of discursive domestication and therefore became a sensitive point in politically oriented analyses. Particularly in more recent productions, a response to this patriarcal approach, present in various cinematographies, was the total rejection of images of desire. Desexualizing in order to humanize: this was a possible path. And a equally treacherous one.

Italian historian Silvia Federici warns that, in colonial and heteropatriarchal capitalism, the body was the first territory of collective expropriation, transformed into a machine of production and reproduction – objectified by other means. Claiming it, she says, is the the revolution at point zero. The body must go through a radical change, ignited by leisure, dance, and eros. The erotic, as Audre Lorde says, is a vital force through which women can transform each other, shaking the pillars and certainties of a world forged by men.

At the 27th Tiradentes Film Festival, held in 2024, male libido was swelled with abundance and boldness through a series of films, especially shorts, determined to push the boundaries of taste and pleasure. If all political-sexual expansion is welcome, such excess revealed the embarrassed silence of our own hunger (during a debate, programmer Roger Koza even said that this was the festival with the most glimpses of penises he had ever seen in his life).

With excitement, I realize that in 2025, female fantasies have once again conjured fearless visualities.

Starting with Safo: a doce-amarga (Larissa Muniz, MG), a pearl of the Panorama Showcase, a non-competitive and often more daring window of the event. The director herself defined it as amateur. Yes, it is a short film for those who love women and movies. Muniz carefully and irreverently handles excerpts from lesbian-feminist fiction from the 1970s and 1980s, gluing or assembling, in a rhyming and positively loose narrative, small pieces of tenderness, lust and flirtation. Without announcing, in advance, the origin of more or less recognizable characters - such as Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, Sara Gómez's Yolanda or Su Friedrich's dyke nuns - we perceive, through the texture of the images, clues of another time in cinema. In the reconstruction of a history of gestures, condensed by the fractional reading of Anne Carson and Monique Wittig, Muniz reveals the traces of a broad and unrestricted boldness that we must reclaim. Looking, touching, kissing, rubbing and fucking: embracing Medusa without fear of freezing. Carnal reciprocity is liberating. One character says: “I love to have sex in front of the camera”.

At the Mostra Foco, Entre Corpos , by Mayra Costa (AL), also invests in montage-collage to expand feelings. It is a light, strange film, in which the banal and the unusual share the same dramatic temperature - the continuity is accentuated by the leveling use of black and white. The seamstress Vânia (Ticiane Simões) lines up hems and ties knots in assholes. She explores desires, more or less accepted by her clients, with the fresh detachment of childish curiosity. The protagonist even nurtures confidences with a child, which (courageously) highlights the playful dimension of this sexual play. And Vânia records everything: in her own montage-collage, she builds a porn-mural of photographs with the viscosity of her genital fluids: she masturbates and glues them to release her impulses. On and off the camera frame, the character and director rearrange imaginaries of femininity against prudishness.

What most weakens the aesthetic and thematic proposition of Costa’s work is its paratext, the synopsis. Ticiane Simões’ Vânia is characterized as “a woman marked by traumas”, suggesting that they are the origin of her resolute search for pleasure. Fortunately, these traumas do not translate into the film’s diegesis, which in fact projects a woman who is very capable of sustaining and countering her intimate negotiations.

The critical and imaginative collage continued to trigger feminist films. Tamagochi_Balé , by Ana Costa e Silva (RJ), is a performative and cyberpunk dystopia that laments the dematerialization of human relations. It evokes another short film shown last year in Tiradentes, Onde Está Mymme Mastroiagnne? (2023), by biarritzzz, which, like Tamagochi_Balé , is part of the culture of machinima (a combination of the words “machine”, “animation” and “cinema”). The metaverse constructed in biarritzzz’s work aimed to erect a space, complementary to the real world, capable of accommodating the breadth of queer experiences . In Tamagochi_Balé , on the contrary, there is pessimism and terror with the inventive possibilities of digital technologies, inseparable from a neoliberalism that undermines, precisely, the transformative physicality of common satisfactions. The future of fake sex is inhospitable. Made entirely from archive footage (very different from the ones of Safo: The Sweet and Sour ) and from Zoom footage , even the subject behind the camera is disembodied. At times, the more explanatory tone of the narration contrasts with the hallucinatory quality of the virtual universe. But the film is blunt in its fears. And it is not defeatist: it ends with the sound of Cher, whose chorus-question takes on other meanings: "do you believe in life after love?" Ana Costa, with her dancing actress, seems to say no.

Recognizing the desire for desire through cinema implies, in fact, accepting our fears and risks. Luna Alkalay, a septuagenarian filmmaker who was part of a generation that broke new ground, returns to directing after a long hiatus to talk about the cursed love of an old woman. In a soberly chaotic, consciously delirious work, Alkalay reenacts the anguish of “falling completely in love with a half-man”, 35 years younger. She does in cinema what Annie Ernaux, in Simple Passion (2023) , did in literature. Both are bold in tackling the theme and in handling their autofictional languages.

As in the other films, Trópico de Leão (SP) assumes - in its own way, evidently - a dissonant collage of different registers: of overlapping narrations and stagings, of theatrical performances and their averse rehearsals - which implied a meticulous effort by the editor Rama de Oliveira, who manages to stitch together the chaos without draining its provocative energy. To tame, in a psychoanalytic sense, the consequences of an abusive relationship, Alkalay invokes three founding figures of the myths and counter-myths of femininity, fragments of her narcissistic and irascible mirror : Echo (Chris Maksud), who recites everything the man tells her; Penelope (Fabia Renata), who waits for him, obediently; and Medeia, played by legendary and fiery actress Helena Ignez, who wants revenge.

Metaphor, as a tool, has accompanied Alkalay since Blood Crystals (1974), her first feature film, recently restored decades after its last showing. In this film, metaphor is a ruse against censorship to talk about the violence of the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1985). In Trópico de Leão, metaphor also seems to serve the unsaid, that which is silenced by other structures of coercion and power: not an authoritarian regime, but a mutable and persistent patriarchy, which continues to attack the impertinence of our passions.

Beyond the metaphors, Trópico de Leão inherits from Crystals of Blood its archives and its flesh, showing that the director’s concerns persist fifty years later. The dictatorship, the massacre of the Yanomami people, the pandemic or the harshness and cruelty of the concentration camps that imprisoned her mother in the past are issues that permeate and aggravate her martyrdom. This metaphorical cinema is her way of “transforming tragedies into highly bearable dramas”, although, when she speaks of death, she insists that “every metaphor is literal”. The echo that remains, after the session, has a woman’s voice.

The only work directed by a female director at the Aurora Showcase, a competition dedicated to first-time feature-length film directors, confirms the commitment of a certain contemporary feminist cinema to the ambiguity (and power) of eros. Cartografia das Ondas (RJ), by Heloísa Machado, adopts the mis en abyme as the foundation of its formal arrangement: there is a film within the film within the film. In a first layer, with documentary-essayistic tones, the two screenwriters - Machado and Gledson Mercês - discuss their respective dealings with life and with the cinematographic work in process. They renew a certain tradition of the first-person documentary, with two (and more) narrating instances that meet and part ways in an attempt to finish a project begun ten years ago. They talk about the difficulties of filmmaking, without losing sight of the dimensions of class and race that exist in the craft.

This unfinished, fictional project involves the story of a prostitute, Teresa (Indira Nascimento), who is taken by Charon to a paradise island of dead whores. The island, however, is not so idyllic. The arrangement of the photography and the costumes refer to the pictorial elaborations of a Renaissance art produced, mostly, by men - in fact, it is a man, Mercês' alter ego, who creates these paintings diegetically. The women, however, do not seem to have a firm bond of complicity. Even the scene in which they dance together, like witches, seems to be more indebted to the hegemonic visualities of the sabbats than to their political reinvention. Finally, the work suggests the incompatibility of prostitution and motherhood, since the women of the island are forced to abandon their children, obstacles to full pleasure. The wife/mother-whore dichotomy is one of the ontological poles that constitute the esteemed femininity. The whore, an abject opposition, is its negation. In defending the autonomy of bodies, Cartografia das Ondas can reiterate these apparently irreconcilable divisions.

Such discomforts, however, are not necessarily harmful. Machado proudly assumes the danger of misunderstanding. The film within the film carries the idiosyncrasies of the screenwriter within the character. Contradictions make sense within a wandering and groping work.

It is worth highlighting, and indeed celebrating, another reference in Cartografia das ondas to the history of visual arts. The director, whose career was marked by pregnancy - which is incorporated into the film - offers us her own reinterpretation of Courbet's The Origin of the World . She opens up her intimacy and her legs, reminding the audience of Tiradentes that radical cinema is not made of throbbing penieses alone.

This text was originally published on the Sara y Rosa website.