Rua Ataléia
2021 · 12m · Brazil
Directed by André Novais Oliveira
Genres: documentary, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Footage shot during a 2011 blackout — a family talking by candlelight — edited ten years later into a meditation on memory and light.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Most people would see a home video essay and default to nostalgia—Novais instead uses the blackout as an excuse to interrogate the gap between lived time and edited time, which is genuinely weird and refuses to settle into comfort.
A formally precise work that inherits the essay-film tradition while pushing it forward: the ten-year distance between capture and assembly becomes the film's actual subject, and every editing choice reflects that temporal consciousness with rigor.
The decision to hold on ambient candlelight rather than cut for information creates this strange, almost unbearable intimacy—it's the restraint that makes the difference between found footage and something that actually means something.
Reviews
André promove um resgate de um pertencimento, de uma família que resiste e se empodera por meio das suas memórias. São as rememorações de uma família que habita as rotinas e que, com pouca luz, a fósforo, resiste no que há de belo nas banalidades do sempre: o ato de viver.