Family film: cinema, memories and identities

Abstract

In the short movie A gente se encontra ao domingos (2021), directed by the author herself, ordinary stories are crossed by social matters, family relations, and the feeling of belonging to different places; common issues of the Brazilian Cinema. Through an intimate dialogue, tales of personal cinematographic experiences gather into memories and remembrances that depict the familiar background of the director. The paper proposes a discussion through the discourses presented in the short movie, combining it with the idea of “places of memory” by the historian Pierre Nora (1993), along with the theory of “space and place in a perspective of experience” as defined by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1983). The text also calls upon the notion of “distributions of the sensible” by Jacques Rancière (2005), passing through Walter Benjamin's childhood fragments (1987) and some relations between memory and identity proposed by Joël Candau (2011).