

ESTAMIRA (BRAZIL / 2004) 



Documentary films about 63-year-old schizophrenics who work at garbage dumps aren't supposed to be this transcendently beautiful. But Marcos Prado's second directorial effort, Estamira, which features the eponymous mentally and emotionally distraught woman who's been scavenging the enormous Jardim Gramacho landfill on the outskirts of Rio for the past twenty years, is that and more. Prado followed his subject for nearly five years, at the start of which she was being treated at a psychiatric clinic, much to her displeasure to say the least. Estamira, however, wouldn't be an ordinary case for anyone. She was abused as a child and was later forced to prostitute herself by a family member. Her mother spent considerable amount of time at an aging and overcrowded mental facility, where she later passed away. Estamira had to suffer through two violent, emotionally crippling marriages, and the younger of her two daughters was taken away from her at an early stage due to her unstable condition. Prado's intimately revealing interviews with her two older children illuminate the fact that things were taking a turn for the better when they eventually asked her to leave the junkyard for health-related reasons, and she did, but not long after she was brutally raped one night right outside her house. 

Unlike most documentaries about troubled individuals, Estamira's past isn't related in a linear, prepackaged mode. It's as if Prado wanted the viewers to discover it in the same way he did -- we follow broken pieces of information and stunted memories that somehow end up deepening the work and its protagonist. Prado's aesthetic respectfully emulates Estamira's condition. The film switches between grainy black-and-white vérité to serenely composed shots in color -- the striking images of overcast skies teeming with wild birds hovering just above the heads of people standing in mounds of trash (which I haven't seen so many of since Filipino filmmaker Mario O'Hara's Woman of Breakwater [2004]) are simply unforgettable -- in a manner similar to its subject's transformation from being lucidly poetic to ranting blasphemously in a dialect all her own (she blames god for all modern ills and believes that the universe revolves around her). However Prado doesn't turn away during such moments, which admittedly will be too close for comfort for some (at one point, an extremely angry Estamira shows her young grandson where babies really come from). Like Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006), this narration-less effort may also receive some criticism for not contextualizing poverty within a larger framework, but in its own way it's arguably just as remarkable, nearly visionary piece of work.