Estamira
DIR Marcos Prado | Brazil | 2004 | 115 min.
In Portugese with English Subtitles.
SHOWTIMES:
Thur, Sept 29, 7:00pm, PCP
Sun, Oct 2, 3:00pm, GR1
Reviewed by Gloria Wong
Photographer Marcos Prado shot and directed this aesthetically beautiful but difficult documentary over the course of several years. The titular Estamira is a woman in her sixties who suffers from severe schizophrenia. Her adult children have all but given up on helping her. She works at and scavenges a huge garbage dump outside of Rio De Janeiro. She is an angry, damaged woman, prone to breaking into fits of spitting rage, ranting at God or screaming in her own language.
Prado's camera catches all the violent, ranting extremes of her mental illness in unflinching detail, and it's there that the film strays into an ethical grey zone. Is it right to stick your camera in the face of a person who may not be aware of what you’re trying to accomplish? If your subject is not able to tell you when to turn off the camera, how do you know when you've crossed the line? While the scenes of Estamira working at the dump have a poetic quality rarely found in modern documentaries, the overall effect reminds us that sometimes a 20-minute short will do where a 2-hour feature doesn't.