HOW NICE TO SEE YOU ALIVE


Title   Cast   Director   Year Shown  Other Info    Country  Notes 


Que bom te ver viva

Brazil, 1989, 100 min

Shown in 1990

CREDITS

dir
Lúcia Murat
scr
Lucia Murat
cam
Walter Cavalho
editor
Vera Freire
cast
Irene Ravache

OTHER

prod co
Taiga Prod. Visuais; Fundacao Do Cinema Brasileiro
source
Fundacao do Cinema Brasileiro, Avenida Bresil 2482, 20930 Rio de Janeiro RJ, Brasil, FAX: 21-580-9848
premiere
U.S. Premiere

COMMENTS

Lucia Murat attended the screening.

A series of interviews with former political prisoners interspersed with fictional dialogue by actress Irene Ravache. "Like many others of my generation, I dreamed of making Brazil into a utopia," says journalist and filmmaker Lúcia Murat. Like many others of her generation, Murat was arrested and tortured for her political activism during the military dictatorship of the 1960s. After a long period of silence and denial, today it is the chic thing to talk about the torture—the fact of it, that is, not the experience of it. So Murat's extraordinary film is decidedly un-chic; in it, eight political prisoners, all women, speak frankly about their months and years in prison. Moreover, they articulate the price of surviving an experience that even their friends, husbands and children wish to cushion in silence. Today these woman are activists, university professors, mothers, committed in every way to life. But privately each still struggles to recoup what the torturer took, what one woman calls the "the pleasure of thinking." Murat intersperses the interviews with a fictional monologue performed by the actress Irene Ravache. Her anger may be too easy beside the profound humanity of these women whose lives are perforce unscripted. For them, surviving the torture is a lifelong project with paradoxes built in: "On the one hand, you pretend nothing happened; on the other hand, you pretend you didn't survive."

—Judy Bloch

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