Knowledge Ties #9: MADALENA

20:00
MADALENA 
Madiano Marcheti, Brazil 2021, 85 min. Portuguese with English subtitles, DCP

21:45
Conversation between Madiano Marcheti and Aline Baiana (Portuguese with simultaneous translation into English)

In a rural town in Mato Grosso, a region in western Brazil where plantations meet – and encroach upon – the Cerrado ecosystem, the corpse of Madalena, a trans woman, is found amidst a soy field. The film traces the lives of three protagonists: Club hostess Luziane, Cristiano, the son of a wealthy landowning family, and Bianca, a trans woman and close friend to Madalena. While they don’t know one another and have almost nothing in common, each of them reacts to Madalena’s disappearance in their own way. With its unusual representation of the country’s landscape where the Brazilian savanna is increasingly destroyed to make space for monoculture crops, the film draws attention to transphobic violence in Brazil – that in the countryside rarely makes the news.

In the conversation, Madiano Marcheti and Aline Baiana will share their respective research into the parallels between the erasure of biodiversity, the growing violence against marginalized human and more-than-human lives and conservative, white hegemonic politics. (BFKF)

Aline Baiana is an Afro-Pindoramic artist born in 1985 in the territory today known as Brazil. Having graduated in cinema and studied environmental management and contemporary art, her research addresses Afro-Brazilian and Native-American worlding practices and ontological conflicts between the Global North and South. With her research “Resisting domestication: Monoculture and the annihilation of difference,” she is currently a fellow of the Berlin Artistic Research Programme.

Madiano Marcheti was born and raised in the state of Mato Grosso, in Brazil’s Amazon region. He is currently working on his next feature film Mother of Gold while developing the script for the projects Images of the Dungeon (Dir. Carolina Aleixo) and Muff on Muff (Dir. Lia Kulakauskas). His previous short films The Coldest Place in Rio, The Weight of Loving You, In Transit and Void have been screened and awarded at Brazilian and international film festivals.