Film Movement has announced the theatrical release of the Brazilian film Memory House / Casa de Antiguidades, the audacious debut feature by João Paulo Miranda Maria. The film, an official selection at the Cannes Film Festival 2020 and winner of the Roger Ebert Award for Best New Director at the Chicago Film Festival, opens at BAM in New York City and the Laemmle Glendale in Los Angeles on Friday, September 3.
Memory House conjures a surreal image of the racial and social rifts in modern day Brazil. Cristovam (played by Cinema Novo icon Antônio Pitanga), an Indigenous Black man from the rural North, moves to an industrialized Southern town populated by the descendants of Austrian ex-pats to work in a milk factory. Immediately confronted with their virulent racism, he becomes more and more estranged from the white world. Upon discovering an abandoned house filled with objects reminding him of his origins, Cristovam begins a spiritual and physical metamorphosis...
With dreamlike images steeped in traditional Brazilian folklore from Oscar-winning cinematographer Benjamin Echazarreta (A Fantastic Woman), Memory House is a “a study of what happens to an oppressed minority as decades of abuse chip away at his humanity” and “a timely commentary on integration and colonialism” (Variety).
Watch the trailer:
