Premiering in the international competition at Visions du Réel, “Saudades Eternas” is the feature debut of visual artist and director Emma Boccanfuso, drawn from years spent filming inside Rio de Janeiro’s Chapéu Mangueira favela.
The film centers on Sueli, a formidable matriarch presiding over a busy, multi-generational household. Within the walls of her home, daily life unfolds – arguments, laughter, children growing up – while outside, gang shootings and deaths continue at a steady pace.
“Saudades Eternas”
Courtesy of VdR
The film never leaves the house, which is both refuge and witness to the cycles of life and loss beyond its walls. The most you see of the outside world is the beach of Copacabana from the terrace, just a few hundred meters away.
Boccanfuso’s starting point was the cultural shock she experienced when she first arrived in the favela.
“What really hit me was their relationship to death. There were a multitude of deaths and shootings that broke out while I was there,” she tells Variety. Coming from what she describes as a contained experience of death – “the hospital, the cemetery” – she was struck by the contrast. “I felt that the boundaries between the dead and the living were completely dissolved… and that they had an ease in accepting death.”
That tension became the core of the project. “I needed to live there to try to understand how it could be possible to live in such violence and at the same time to live life at 300%, to be the most smiling people I have ever met.”
Originally conceived as an installation piece during her studies at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, the film grew organically into a feature.
“I was really just filming with my smartphone – I filmed static shots, like paintings that I projected onto the wall,” she says. “To try to recreate this house and invite the viewer to feel this experience of violence that takes place outside, from within the house.”
Over time, Boccanfuso – who moved into a house next door – became part of the family, and they grew accustomed to being filmed. Her stripped-down approach ultimately defines the film’s aesthetic.
Sound plays a central role in conveying what the camera doesn’t show: Boccanfuso reconstructs the violence through what is heard, incorporating additional recordings – gunfire, fragments of conversations between gang members captured on walkie-talkies – which were recorded separately and integrated into the sound edit.
It never occurred to her to film the violence itself, she says, or even the family’s reactions to the deaths. In a context where shootings are frequently filmed and routinely circulated, often in real time via local messaging groups, she was unsettled by what she saw as a normalization of such images, particularly among children.
This absence created a structural challenge in the edit. “You want to talk about all these deaths, but we don’t have the images,” she recalls of conversations with her editor.
The solution was to build a narrative system around absence. Voice messages announcing deaths are layered over static shots of an empty home, echoing her own experience of events unfolding.
“We decided to represent the violence in the film exactly as I experienced it with my camera: off-screen, inside the house, confined with the characters, waiting for information on the phone,” piecing events together “by word of mouth, from one window to another,” she explains.
The film does not attempt to map each death into a clear narrative. What emerges is less a catalogue of tragedy than a portrait of resilience.
“We approached death more as a multitude accumulating around Sueli – and more broadly within the favela – rather than trying to make the viewers understand who is who.”
For Boccanfuso, whose previous work was rooted in the contemporary art world, the film’s selection at Visions du Réel is an opportunity to reach a wider audience and shed light on a community living within conditions shaped by systemic injustice.
She is now considering a follow-up set on Copacabana beach, where she would reconnect with the same characters, now working as surf instructors and street vendors, to portray the legendary beach from their point of view, away from its postcard image.
Produced by Close Up Films and Macalube Films, with co-production support from Radio Télévision Suisse (RTS), “Saudades Eternas” will world premiere in the main competition at Visions du Réel on April 21.
Visions du Réel runs in Nyon until April 26.
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