Unlivable / Inabitável
2021 · 20m · Brazil
Directed by Matheus Farias, Enock Carvalho
Tones: melancholic, tender, tense
In Brazil, where a trans person is murdered every three days, Marilene searches desperately for her missing daughter Roberta, a trans woman. As time runs out, she finds a fragile glimmer of hope high in the sky.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A formally restrained, morally necessary film — Farias and Carvalho work in the tradition of Brazilian social cinema while centering a story almost never told at this register, and its Sundance selection in International Fiction is a mark of that seriousness.
Sundance 2021. Brazilian trans mother searching for missing trans daughter, magical glimmer in the sky — that final image is either earned or a cop-out, and Sundance bet on the former. I will too.
Sundance 2021 selection grounding Brazil's anti-trans murder statistic in a mother's search — twenty minutes that bets political urgency works best at intimate scale. The framing is unimpeachable.
Festivals
- Sundance Film Festival 2021