Cinema Slate has announced the New York theatrical release of Caetano Gotardo’s feature debut The Moving Creatures (O Que Se Move) on Friday, September 11, 2015, at Cinema Village.
The Brazilian drama was written and directed by Caetano Gotardo and features songs by Gotardo and Marco Dutra (Hard Labor). It stars Cida Moreira (below, as Maria Júlia), Andrea Marquee (as Silvia), Fernanda Vianna (as Ana) and Rômulo Braga (as Eduardo).
The second film in the ongoing Brazilian Film Series: Year One (after I Touched All Your Stuff, to be released on August 28), The Moving Creatures was an official selection at the Miami International Film Festival, and won a Best Actress (Cida Moreira; left) and Best Film (Fiction) award at Berlin’s Latin American Film Festival (Lakino). Available on the same day in theaters and, exclusively, to Fandor subscribers, The Moving Creatures will open in other markets during the Fall.
In Caetano Gotardo’s lyrical omnibus film The Moving Creatures, three very different mothers are confronted, through three very different trials-by-ordeal, with the limits of what a mother “just knows”. With little fanfare (and not a whiff of the blatant “interconnectedness” often de rigueur among multi-story films), the daily rhythms and textures of three families unfold before us – and at the end of each story, all three mothers arrive at an understanding that can only be expressed by erupting the film’s very reality.
In the film’s first story, a mother (Maria Júlia, played by famed Brazilian actress, singer and performer Cida Moreira), learns about her son’s most intimate secret. On the second tale, an enigmatically afflicted sound engineer (Eduardo, played by Rômulo Braga) skulks through his day of nausea and confusion, while his wife Silvia (Andréa Marquee) muses on the scope of infant wisdom with a friend, as the two gaze at the former’s child. What happens next throws both parents into a state of shock. The final story follows João (Henrique Schafer) and Ana (Fernanda Vianna) on their preparations to re-encounter their long-lost son.
While The Moving Creatures is by and large as diegetically sober as a Rossellini or Dogma film, each act concludes with its respective mother breaking the codes of realism – and into song. For director Gotardo, who skeletally (and almost incidentally) gleaned the film’s material from three news items, music was the fitting choice of expressing the inexpressible.
For some, such untrained speak-singing about sex crimes and the life-lessons of arcade games may induce titters, but for the receptive, these moments are salient entries in the inscrutable lexicon of the heart.
