Ash Wednesday

DE 2023, 30 min

Brazilian Portuguese

synopsis

It is the last day of carnival at a favela in Rio de Janeiro, where gunshot sounds are incessant and the military presence is constant. Demétria is waiting for Cora, her only child, to come back home from school, but a surprise police raid commences outside. As night falls and she struggles to hold on to the fading hopes of finding her daughter, Demétria will be visited by three characters – The Policeman, The Pastor and The Governor.

Ash Wednesday is a production of Schuldenberg Films in co-production with Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, funded by the German Ministry of Culture (BKM) and War on Screen Fabrique/Region Grand Est of France. Co-directed by Bárbara Santos, it celebrated its world premiere in February 2023 at the 73rd Berlinale - Berlin Intl. Film Festival in the section Perspektive Deutsches Kino for up-and-coming talent in German cinema. Its South American premiere took place in October 2023 at the Rio de Janeiro Intl. Film Festival.

directors’ statement

From January to June 2020, a period of intense social isolation, 99 children and young people were killed by Rio de Janeiro's state police, many of them in their own homes or on their way to and from school. Although the images of heavily armed police targeting young children in their homes or a politician in a suit and tie flying over the favela in a helicopter may sound absurd at first, they have become anything but unusual in the imaginary of contemporary Brazil.

It was precisely at this time that came the first seed of Ash Wednesday. With an initial idea in mind, João Pedro Prado approached friends from the Brazilian community in Berlin, co-writer Bia Krieger and lead actor Uriara Maciel, and together they wrote the first treatment that got the project selected for the WoS Fabrique Script Lab organized by the French festival War on Screen.

The idea to draw on a tale from ancient Greek mythology came from a desire to tell the story of the thousands of Brazilian mothers who lose their children every year to the abstract idea of a "war on drugs" – a state-sponsored mass murder that has disproportionately decimated the country's Black youth over the past three decades. Hearing over and over again the stories of children killed by police in the streets, in their homes, and even in school, it is impossible not to feel the grief and outrage of the mothers left behind. The images of inconsolable women clenching their fists and resting their heads on small wooden coffins or clinging desperately to blood-soaked school uniforms are all too common in the collective image of Brazilian society. Seeing the resilience of these women in the face of fateful injustice reminds us of archetypal female figures who resisted the oppression they suffered. Some of these female characters, such as Lysistrata and Demeter, are integral parts of Greek mythology.

Bárbara Santos was invited by João to direct alongside him because of her theatrical productions and research focused on rhythm and sound. This experience was the missing piece to ultimately transform the script into a proper musical film. In addition to her contribution for the lyrical adaptation of the dialogues, Bárbara also developed the initial melodies that would later be turned into songs by a team of international composers from the Babelsberg Film University, led by Ole Wiedekamm. These songs were then played on set and the actors sang over their own pre-recorded voices, like in a music video. Besides the playback scenes, all dialogue scenes – the encounters between Demétria and the Policeman, Pastor and Gouverneur inside her home – were recorded live on set. Artist Till Baumann was in charge of composing and playing the live tracks.

The characterisation of Ash Wednesday as a musical means that the dialogues are sung entirely in Brazilian Portuguese, accompanied by a constantly evolving music. One of the greatest references were the films of Jacques Demys such as Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) and Un Chambre en Ville (1984). Our decision to make a musical film can be traced back to three main reasons: First, we wanted to evoke the rhythms of epic poetry like Homer's Hymn to Demeter. Second, we believe that singing dialogue revives the African-Brazilian tradition of using music as a means of expressing and overcoming painful collective experiences. And last but not least, it stems from our Brechtian desire to partially alienate the audience from the events depicted and make them also reflect on the causes of war, rather than delivering a purely realistic or fetishized experience of violence.

The musical component also allowed us to draw on certain genres of Brazilian popular music such as samba, rap, and carioca funk, important means of expression for the Black and working class people of Rio de Janeiro. The flexibility of the Portuguese language and the different Brazilian musical genres allowed us to create melodies based on a natural dialogue. The score was partly inspired by the typical soundscape of the setting, meaning that the gunshots and police sirens often heard in the background of the favela set the pace of the score.