Dear members, we are pleased to invite you to the General Assembly of the Société des Américanistes, which will take place on December 15, 2021 at 4:30 p.m. (Paris time).

The Assembly will be followed by the screening of the film “Under the Clouds”, directed by Marco Antonio Gonçalves and Eliska Altmann in 2015.

 

Portuguese with english subtitles, 74 minutes

 

In 1961, for the first time in Brazil’s history, a woman, Carolina Maria de Jesus, living in a slum in São Paulo, writes about her daily life and has her diary published. Fifty years later the directors of the film, inspired by this diary, go to look for characters that somehow dialogue with Carolina. In the slum Complexo da Maré, in Rio de Janeiro, five women reveal different experiences and visions of their life in the slum, thus creating continuities and discontinuities with the poetic and critical vision of life expressed by Carolina de Jesus. The voices and visions of these women, Geandra, Iraci, Edilma, Maria da Paz and Vanessa, provide a revigorating and poetically rich image of life in the slums that escapes from the current themes of violence and male dominance, revealing a slum literally lived through a feminine soul. Through the voice of Geandra, an actress, the words written by Carolina gain a new life, in dialogue with the contemporary voices of the other equally strong characters of the women from the Maré complex.