Depois do silêncio (After the Silence)

“Depois do silêncio” (After the silence) is the final part of Christiane Jatahy’s “trilogy of horrors”. It examines the history of slavery and how it still affects us today – given that Brazil was one of the last American countries that abolished slavery in 1888. Jatahy explores the tension lines between fiction and reality, local issues and reverberations of global tendencies in an intimate account of an unresolved past that keeps repeating itself in Brazilian ex-president Bolsonaro‘s fascist politics and beyond. Widely considered as something from another era, Jatahy connects slavery to its huge impact on today’s geopolitical realities and unrooted personal lives that manifest in an ongoing quest for territory and identity – in the hope to clear a ground for the future. “Depois do silêncio” unfolds around the fiction of “Torto Arado” (2019), the internationally acclaimed debut novel by Itamar Vieira Junior, set in the mountainous backcountry of the state of Bahia, and links this unsettling fiction to “Cabra marcado para morrer”, a documentary by Eduardo Coutinho; and to the director’s own research, based on fieldwork and interviews in collaboration with Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous communities of Remanso and Iúna (Chapada Dimantina, Bahia/Brazil).