After being selected as one of the nine projects by film schools in Germany, Poland and France to take part in the Script Lab of the French film festival War on Screen, led in 2020 by author-director Manele Labidi, ASH WEDNESDAY was one of the three films to be awarded with a 15.000 EUR production grant by the jury, led by festival director Philippe Bachman.
The synopsis: It is the last day of carnival at a favela in Rio de Janeiro, where gunshot sounds are incessant and the military presence has been recurrent over the past thirty years. Demétria is waiting for Cora, her only child, to come back home from school, but in the meantime 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 –, all of whom play different parts in the never-ending war outside.
The film is conceived as a twenty-minute musical drama with surreal elements. Its plot is a loose adaptation of the Ancient Greek myth of the Abduction of Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, goddess of fertility and agriculture. The idea to fall back on the motif of Ancient Greek mythology arose from our more elemental desire to tell the story of the thousands of Brazilian mothers who, every year, lose their children to the abstract idea of a “war on drugs” – a state-sponsored mass murder that has been disproportionately decimating the black youth of the country at a crescent rate for the past three decades.
João Pedro Prado will direct the film alongside playwright, director, actress and activist Bárbara Santos. She is the artistic coordinator of the KURINGA theater space in Berlin and founder of Ma(g)dalena International – Feminist Theatre of the Opressed Network, composed by groups from Latin America, Africa and Europe. Bárbara has developed innovative lines of aesthetic investigation focused on the intersections of gender, race and class, having written three books on the subject. As a performer, she explores the conversion of the performative body into a political body, as seen in her one-woman show Passage. More recently, she played the role of Filomena in The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão (Dir: Karim Aïnouz), winner of the Grand Prix of Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2019 and the Brazilian submission for the Academy Awards in 2020.
Early production of the project was led by Klara Otto, being later taken over by Vincent Edusei. ASH WEDNESDAY was written by the four hands of Beatriz Krieger, João Pedro Prado, Bárbara Santos and Uriara Maciel, who will also play the lead character of Demétria. Production is planned for April 2022 with a September 2022 festival release in France.
Crew:
Starring Uriara Maciel
Directing: João Pedro Prado & Bárbara Santos
Screenplay: Beatriz Krieger, João Pedro Prado, Bárbara Santos, Uriara Maciel
Producing: Vincent Edusei
Cinematography: Kléber Nascimento
Editing: Juliano Castro
Costume Design: Gabriel Carneiro
a co-production of the Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF and schuldenberg films