sneersnipe film review

Estamira Marcus Prado Brazil 2004

What is the measure of madness? A clinically disturbed woman who looks around her ad sees a world where “there are no innocent people any more, just wise-guys in reverse”, or the world around her that creates an environment like the landfill at Gramacho, where the bulk of Marcus Prado’s documentary was shot. A woman who spouts a mishmash of pseudoscience, new age claptrap and half-remembered religious rhetoric, but who burns at “being made invisible by so much hypocrisy” and rails at God after a life of abuse, betrayal and ill-fortune, or those around her who swallow their plight with docility and believe without question in Providence?

Alternately shot in the grainiest of black and white that looks as grubbily desolate as the film’s subject matter, a true aesthetics of trash, and betacam colour, Estamira is a film about what we discard. Our mountains of litter, which according to Estamira consists of “waste and carelessness”. Human waste, like Estamira, who, chewed up by life, is left to eke a living sifting through refuse and scavenging what she can where she can. And common sense. One of the most striking things about Estamira’s discourse is how, from amongst the scraps of her broken consciousness, emerge fragments of pure wisdom that the crazy society around her seems to ignore. Or does it? As Estamira says “today everyone is alert. You only err wilfully”.

It is a commonplace that the documentary often treads a thin line between the revelatory and the exploitative. At times, watching Estamira is a little discomfiting for the viewer. It does seem that at times Marcos Prado does egg his subjects on, and Estamira’s distress is palpable. Yet on occasion, her rantings are presented almost as some sort of performance poetry that we’re invited to appreciate as a spectacle. We see the ravages her mental illness has caused on those around her with an unflinching eye that verges on the voyeuristic. This ethical ambiguity is perhaps inescapable. Estamira is a fascinating documentary subject because of her psychosis, which results in a totally unabashed testimony that at times is disturbing in its unhingedness and arresting in its relevance. Nonetheless, whatever qualms we might have, it is undeniable that Estamira’s story deserves to be heard, and reflected upon.

And what is also true is that from these materials, the director has fashioned a captivating, fascinating documentary. One that reveals a life, a landscape and creates a bleak beauty in the process. At one point, her voice deep with emotion, Estamira tells us that “my depression is deep, my depression has no cure”, whilst on screen we see a shot of a small dog, huddled under a blanket, looking out of the corner of its wet and wary eyes at a threatening world. It’s the perfect objective correlative. The name Estamira can be read in Portuguese as “Esta Mira”, or “This gaze” and the view of the world Prado provides in this documentary is one the viewer is unlikely to forget for a long while.

pmc