Brazil, a region in the southwest, somewhere on the coast. From a hut in the middle of a river delta that can only be reached by boat, a little girl named Clarice sets off on her short, long journey through life: like a mayfly, she cruises through the lives of others, relatives, living through her life in a single day that passes completely unaccelerated and more or less mundane for the others. Clarice is a revenant in a strange web of time that weaves vertical plot references from the present to the past through a space organized horizontally in gentle camera movements.
With Sudoeste, Eduardo Nunes, who has previously worked as an editor and assistant director and has made several award-winning short films, presents a remarkable, even outstanding feature film debut. Many years of patient work have gone into this dreamy, surreal work, which was shot in black and white in Super 16 format and then converted to 35mm. The story of a transmigration of souls and the abysmal family secret on which it is based is not so much told as suggested in Sudoeste: While the sparse level of dialog asserts normality and the present, the glimpses hint at the relationships and doom of the past. It gradually reveals itself and takes hold of you with force.
