Reel Brazil #4: REEL WOMEN

Reel Brazil, creatively directed by Nina Shen, and co-curated by Nina Shen & Solange Farkas features historic and contemporary works of video art, experimental cinema, and digital commissions that interrogate systems of control, elevate outsider voices, and reimagine art as a tool of social and political transformation. It draws cultural parallels between Brazil’s post-dictatorship era and the UK’s Thatcher years, exemplified by the UK’s National Disability Movement – the festival explores a lineage of creative resistance, enabled by new technologies. Season 4 presents a trilogy of stylish, bold, and breathtaking moving image works by female filmmakers from Brazil and Argentina (Rita Moreira and Maria Luisa Leal, Gabriela Golder, and Graciela Taquini. Their daring and experimental lens create dreamlike portraits of their female heroines, revealing their relationships, dreams, memories and hopes.

Conversation Piece (single channel version) | Gabriela Golder | 18 mn 58 sec | 2012 | Argentina Originally conceived as a three-channel installation, this single-channel video show two eight-year-old girls read the Communist Manifesto together with their grandmother. There are many concepts that arise from the text they do not understand: ‘the distribution of wealth’, ‘oppressors’ and ‘oppressed’, the ‘struggle’ etc. The young girls read out every word, stumble over each cadence, and seek to understand by asking their grandmother their meanings. The grandmother is Golder’s own mother, a militant in the Argentine Communist Party. In the film she is dressed in an emblematic red colour. She patiently explains to her grand-daughters, each word and its meaning, offering different routes of understanding the text, encouraging them to continue. Golder transforms the reading of the 1848 Communist Manifesto into a metaphor of the development of life, and the passing of wisdom from generation to generation. She emphasises difficulties, doubts, mistakes; she points at the importance of the elders’ guidance but also the challenges, and will to carry on the task, overcoming drawbacks. The scene also has a melancholic tone. It hints at the remnant of the practice of political reflections and stoic resistance that was once the foundation to left-wing intellectual traditions – this practice has now become a distant memory, but always has the potential to inspire the next generation. Director: Gabriela Golder Performers: Juana Imperiali Golder, Carmela Imperiali Golder, Beatriz Rajland Assistant director: Natalia Rizzo Executive Production: Abel Cassanelli Lighting and camera: Mulata Films Gabriela Golder (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1971) is a visual artist, curator and professor of Experimental Video and New Media in Argentina and abroad, Golder is the co-director of both the Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento (BIM) and CONTINENTE, Research Center in Audiovisual Arts, at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, in Argentina. She also serves as curator of the Experimental Video and Film Program of the Modern Art Museum in Buenos Aires. Using video, installations, performance and site specific projects, her works primarily questions memory, institutional violence and the world of labour. Courtesy: Videobrasil Historic Archive

Lo Sublime / Banal (The Sublime / Banal) | Graciela Taquini | 12min 30sec | 2004 | Argentina In this witty and stylish short, the camera is positioned at waist-height and intimately follows two female friends in a domestic kitchen, preparing a delicious and elaborate dessert. Whilst the dessert is being assembled, their humorous dialogue unfolds their memories of their trip to Paris more than 30 years ago, when they met the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar. At the end and while enjoying the dessert, they provide evidence of their memories. Cortázar had apparently signed two postcards for them at their request. On the one addressed to Felicita, he writes ‘Felicitas met the undersigned in Paris (and asks Graciela who will not let her lie)’; on Taquini’s postcard, Cortázar switched the names, ‘Graciela met the undersigned in Paris (ask Felicitas who will not let her lie).’ The works of Buenos Aires-born artist, curator, and cultural agitator Graciela Taquini stand out in a lifetime full of academic and curatorial achievements in Argentinian electronic art. A pioneer of a new experimental video art genre known as ‘auteur documentary’. Courtesy: Videobrasil Historic Archive

Reel Brazil features historic and contemporary works of video art, experimental cinema, and digital commissions that interrogate systems of control, elevate outsider voices, and reimagine art as a tool of social and political transformation. It draws cultural parallels between Brazil’s post-dictatorship era and the UK’s Thatcher years, exemplified by the UK’s National Disability Movement – the festival explores a lineage of creative resistance, enabled by new technologies. Brazil has long stood at the crossroads of authoritarianism and democracy, a nation marked by deep post-colonial struggles, social inequality, and vibrant cultural resistance. Emerging in the wake of Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship (1964–1985), a generation of artists and filmmakers embraced accessible video technologies to document authentic Brazilian realities, challenge mainstream propaganda, and give voice to the marginalized. This body of work forms the powerful core of Reel Brazil, connecting past creative mutinies to urgent contemporary struggles. Creatively directed and co-curated by Nina Shen and presented by CT20 in Folkestone, a coastal town at the intersection of art-led regeneration and class conflict, Reel Brazil also confronts the tensions of gentrification, cultural erasure, and experiences of displacement for local residents. It reclaims space for radical creativity through the power of storytelling.

Eleanor Peake on ‘Conversation Piece’ – In 2025, Gabriela Golder’s ‘Conversation Piece’ has an Urgent Message Listen Here