Sans Souci has been invited back to Campinas, Sao Paulo to create the 3rd edition of Sans Souci Brazil November 21-27, 2022. In this weeklong series of screenings, performances, and discussions, we’ll screen Brazilian dance films and films by Brazilians around the world. Join us for the in-person events if you’re in the neighborhood! For complete information in Portuguese, please visit our Portuguese website, and for a taste of what you’ll see, check out the trailer below!
call for Brazilian dance films
Sans Souci Brazil invited submissions of works that integrate the aesthetics of dance and film from Brazilian artists in Brazil and around the world. For submission to this category, films must have been connected to Brazil in some way (shot in Brazil, Brazilian personnel, etc.) and must have been under 15 minutes long. We accepted a maximum of 3 films per person. Please see our FilmFreeway page for complete rules and terms.
pre-Sans Souci
NEW in 2022: As part of our mission to expand the reach of dance cinema and build audiences in new places, we created an outreach program as a part of SSFBR3. The team presented screenings and interactive video workshops for children in K-12 school systems in rural areas.
- April 5 – town: Araraquara, São Paulo – school: Municipal Dance School “Iracema Nogueira”
- April 8 – town: Araçatub, São Paulo – school: Municipal Theater Castro Alves and Estação Cidadania
- April 11 – town: Taubaté, São Paulo – school: Municipal School of Arts Maestro Fêgo Camargo
screenings
SESC Campinas
Rua Dom José I, 270/333
Bonfim, Campinas – SP, 13070-741
Sans Souci Brazil Exhibition 1
November 24, 2022 at 7:30pm local time
A curated selection of top submissions from our 2022 Brazil category that centralize issues of our time. These screendances incorporate the dramaturgy of the body and the camera and represent Brazilian artists and artists from several countries who connect with Brazil in different ways, portraying the potential of Brazilian diversity.
Tropeiro
2021 / Brazil / 8 min
Based on the dances around the muleteer culture in Brazil, the video visits the memories of nomadic muleteers who, after long journeys, in their breaks, used to dance. The film proposes a glimpse of a moment in which the muleteer dances, by the light of the fire, challenging himself. A dance that is pulse and relax. Fun, challenge, enchantment, and reconnection with the body, which is memory and home in transit.
Incompleteness (Incompletude)
2022 / Brazil / 2 min
There is a space inside us that we rarely visit. A place where time runs different, which is just feeling, the sound is muffled and words are not able to express those thoughts. They are clippings of ourselves that shape our actions and decisions.
To Get You Out of the Rain (Pra Tirar Você da Chuva)
2022 / Brazil / 13 min
In a little boat, isolated in a sea of mountains, three people are being called through the water by a mysterious force to dance with their memories.
The Beast Nature of Being (Da Besta Natureza do Ser)
2021 / Brazil / 11 min
In the labyrinth of everyday life, everything seems to operate to keep us under control. How to dress, how to behave, in which spaces I can or cannot occupy: it is a systemic control over what we could be inside an imaginary city which survives on its illusions of cosmopolitanism. The Beast Nature of Being is a madness for memories, illusions, personas that slide through the autobiographical experience of the dancer/choreographer Maurício de Oliveira.
Assay for the Prelude of the End (Ensaio para o Início do Fim)
2021 / Brazil / 3 min
In ruins. Confined and breathless. On the streets a world that cannot stop invited to awaken from its progressive, straight, ascending count. Civilizing, predatory abstraction, continues, insists on its tomorrow without a horizon. The end is needed. For another start. A dance. A window.
There is Nothing Here (Não Há Nada Aqui)
2021 / Brazil / 15 min
There is Nothing Here (Não Há Nada Aqui) addresses the territory of nowhere, the picture of a dive in the dream space, unstable and nomadic. A homage to the emotional archive of memories and feelings lived or created, intensifying a relationship that strengthens itself beyond the physical borders. A desire to belong that connects to the physical environment beyond its concrete limitations, based on the search for human relations, for the next memories that will come. The moment of now that has passed without ever existing.
Breath (Fôlego)
2018 / Brazil / 5 min
Video of the Concave and Convex Project that honors the life and work of Maestro Carlos Gomes reflecting on the issues of the black body and the classical-popular paradox.
Sans Souci Brazil Exhibition 2
November 25, 2022 at 7:30pm local time
A curated selection of top submissions from our 2022 Brazil category that explore the body as a canvas for artistic representation and experimentation. These screendances incorporate the dramaturgy of the body and the camera and represent Brazilian artists and artists from several countries who connect with Brazil in different ways, portraying the potential of Brazilian diversity.
Greda
2020 / Brazil / 8 min
Greda: feminine noun. Kind of soft and absorbent clay, but it can be reduced to powder. Clay is something used to build, to mold. It is something that transforms itself by allowing itself to be transformed. It’s something that reminds you of the possibilities of things. Permanence and ephemerality in one. And that same clay can turn to mud. Mud. Which is something that sinks, that swallows, that ceases. It makes you stop breathing. What can you do with chalk, with clay, with mud? What can you do to not be reduced to dust?
Thru (Através)
2021 / Brazil / 6 min
What’s through? The mind overflows – labyrinths, falls and delusions. This film composes a series of screendances created from telephone calls with real people, full of stories and affections during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. The project was realized in the Student-Artist Program of the State University of Campinas/BRA.
Locomotives (Locomotivas)
2022 / Brazil / 12 min
Locomotives is a provocation in video art that weaves the timeline, evoking the memories of the bodies that boiled through the curves of the city of Recife. A kind of clock that regulates the hands of time, summoning images and stories. A metaphor that provides the necessary energy for the movement of the train, Locomotives carries infinite amounts of movement in the bodies, advancing in the percussive traces of the frevo history. The syntax of arrivals and departures challenges us to travel by words, steps and movements of bodies, by light and in a musical startle it declares itself in a state of improvisation. The bodies that, on February 7, 1907, knew the mechanics of dreams and desires, stumbling through the streets, full of personalities in conflict and enjoyment. We play with the body, expand consciousness and in a flight, we tear a luminous and subversive trace in the history of frevo.
Experiment #1 (Experimento #1)
2019 / Brazil / 2 min
How to experience a place through the memory of our body. Starting from this principle, this contemporary dance work is expressed about the corporal questions, related to the experiences with a physical space. These relationships go beyond material questions and overflow ideas, feelings, dynamics, actions and movements. The narrative is based on the fusion of the concepts of cinematic movement from a cinematographic point of view.
Desire and Necessity (Desejo e Necessidade)
2021 / Brazil / 11 min
A family of migrants from the interior come to the fair in Campina Grande the search for the father who left in search of work. He left torn between the desire to stay and the need for sustenance. Soon they discover the turmoil that is life in urban society. With its dynamic that grinds individuals and destroys that already torn family.
Dance for a Poem (Dança Para um Poema)
2022 / Brazil / 6 min
This work was developed from the research of poems collected in listening points in the city of Londrina, and seeks to trace paths between Dance and Word, linking, in a poetic way, the textual compositions with the movements of a body, present, that dances, creates and feels, giving expression to the voices that are present.
Body’s Small [Mis]fits (Pequenos [Des]ajustes do Corpo)
2022 / Brazil / 13 min
Two women move among the furniture in an antique shop, creating temporary adhesions to the objects and to each other. They play with gravity acting on their bodies, subtracting the weight of things. Different ways of not fitting in, or attempts to escape the body’s misfits in unlikely paths and climbs, where time is dilated or accelerated. A reality tensioned by the “camera’s gaze” between gestures, furniture and objects replicated.
Dance
2019 / Brazil / 3 min
Dance is a project with the aim of exposing questions and dialogues about the materiality of female bodies. The film talks about the dichotomy of freedom and the imprisonment of human beings. At the same time, “Dance” talks about inhabiting this limited body in the materiality of this existence and living this experience through intersubjective and symbolic exchanges. Dance also proposes to talk about the machismo concepts that point, mainly, to the female body The film was inspired by the story of Rafaela Pontes, a 22-year-old practitioner of the art of pole dance, who, on the paths that cross and intersect the woman’s body, bumps into the walls of prejudice and machismo. Dance is also about looking at bodies. The film speaks not only about Rafa, but about the existence of the female body in Brazil or in our humanity. The choice of narrative told through poetry came from contact with several stories of women in this process of connection and (re)connection with their own existence. From this, a poetic discourse that represents each woman is born. Dance was recorded in the city of Curitiba and Pinhas, Paraná, Brazil, in 2019. It falls under the category of video art, musical film or experimental film.
Sans Souci Brazil All Ages
November 26, 2022 at 11am
A curated selection of family-friendly submissions from our 2022 Brazil category, featuring dancers of all ages and abilities. Can the visualization of diverse images and dancing bodies promote a connection with other senses, especially with movement? Artist and dancer Rosely Conz will host this screening alongside a live presentation that proposes observing the aspects of these screendances, such as movements, speed, gestures, and music. Audiences are invited to experience and respond to the screendances, encouraging a dynamic and interactive exhibition.
Ella
2021 / Brazil / 5 min
Ella is about the other that co-habits in me, in you, the multifaceted self, Leminski’s counter-narcissus and Angélica Freitas’ woman in red. Of the moving in rage, of the noise, of the dissonance of colors and forms.
Rubik’s
2021 / Brazil / 2 min
A dance composed of two; with distinct histories and bodies. The research of movement and gestures in body and space now needs to be thought of in other aspects. With another lockdown faced in Fortaleza, the choreography of the three-dimensional space compulsorily needs to be solved in another space, this is the one of the screen, a two-dimensional space. Each one at home records part of the partiture, shares and edits it. With absolute reference to Piet Mondrian and his Neoplastic works and the abstractionism of geometric shapes, now, in Rubik’s the game happens not only between two, but, you the spectator are invited to create composition together. In the frenzy of images that appear and disappear, you create from your gaze a choreographic composition together with the performers.
Brazilian Impressions (Impressões Brasileiras)
2022 / Brazil / 12 min
Inspired by myths from the Amazon, Raul Bopp wrote “Cobra Norato,” a modernist poem that narrates the saga of a hero, journeying through the forest to find and save the daughter of Queen Luzia, his idealized woman, from imprisonment. The mask of the ox – from the traditional drama performance of Bumba Meu Boi, the protagonist of numerous popular dances across Brazil, represents rebirth. In this short interpretation, he assumes the role of hero and saviour. Brazilian Impressions is a fantasy about the encounter of the daughter of Queen Luzia, a character from poetry, with the ox, a character from folklore. It commemorates Brazilian modernist poetry and popular culture through symbols, images, music and bodies in movement.
Kite (Pipa)
2018 / Brazil / 10 min
The act of flying a kite is a frequent practice in Rio de Janeiro communities, as well as in Brazilian peripheries, it is intended to bring this movement in its multiple power in the bodies of actor-dancers living in the Parque das Missões community, located in the municipality of Duque de Caxias – RJ. It was decided to use the flagstone as a place to represent this movement, as well as the reverberations of the kite object in the body.
Stone Jungle
2021 / Brazil / 2 min
The art of finding. The art of connecting. In the harshness of São Paulo, the body confronts the city. The body confronts itself. The body finds caress in the skin, in the touch and in the arms of the other.
#sextou!
2021 / Brazil / 4 min
#sextou! is a dance film produced by Renata Paulino in partnership with the Fluxo em Redes’ project and the musician Carva. It composes a series called “meu corre” that speaks, in a subjective way, about the different moods of each day of week. Close the computer, turn off everything, including the mind from work, and sink into the couch, or go to the bar, or order that delicious food, or meet friends. #sextou! it’s the happy feeling that the long-awaited rest has arrived, and what I couldn’t do this week, okay, it’s for next week.
La Bonne Madame: Dois Lados da Mesma Moeda (La Bonne Madame: Dois Lados da Mesma Moeda)
2022 / Brazil / 1 min
The characters Bonne and Madame came from the sewing wardrobe of my grandmother Lucy, an expert seamstress. If by day she is Bonne, the maid who does all the chores (French: la bonne à tout faire) by night she is Madame! The crossing between these two worlds, like the opposite sides of the same coin, is accompanied by the musical counterpoint between Ernesto Nazareth and Debussy. Bonne Madame pays tribute to all women who dedicate their lives to housework.
Interlocutions with the City
2021 / Brazil / 6 min
Solitary dancers play and deceive the idea of isolation, each one breaking their borders and expanding it into the imaginary. They continue are creating encounters with the city and the other through the movement and poetry.
Sans Souci Brazil: 6 Brasis
November 26, 2022 at 4pm
This screening is inspired by the Brazilian biomes – Amazon Rainforest, Caatinga, Cerrado, Atlantic Rainforest, Pampa, and Pantanal – and the 5 regions of Brazil. The films in this selection showcase the exuberant forests, Brazilian rivers, and dry areas, while prompting a reflection on these environments’ degradation, disorganized exploitation, and potential destruction if action is not taken toward more sustainable relationships.
Renascente
2022 / Brazil / 8 min
Renascente reflete nosso desejo de busca por uma atitude menos antropocêntrica e mais destinada à regeneração e ao sentir-se relacional em estado de abertura e em tessitura constante com o meio, com o outro, com o mundo, com a natureza.
Raiz D’água
2021 / Brazil / 15 min
Raiz D’água is a video performance that sounds like a dive into the blackness of history itself – (auto)biography and body- crossroads experienced on stage.
Enchanted
2011 / Brazil / 1 min
Inspired by the mythical universe of orality of brazilian Amazon, the Enchanted (Encantada) research began with the legend of the Princess of Algodoal island. It is said that there lives a beautiful Princess enchanted who lives six months in the form of a woman and six months in the form of a giant snake. Seen as one of the protective beings of that island, the Princess is omnipresent either playing tricks on those who do not believe in her existence, or on the moonlit nights when she appears resplendent for the natives (caboclos) who lives there.
Luvemba
2021 / Brazil / 6 min
Created by Maria Clara Laet, Luvemba is an artistic rendering of death during the Covid-19 pandemic from the perspective of the Bakongo cosmogram. Bringing together tap dance, elements of the Central African cosmovision and the thinking of philosophers as Tiganá Santana and Bunseki Fu-Kiau, Luvemba is an audiovisual account of the presence of absense that the pandemic imposed on us. The first ideas and experimentations for this project began in April 2020, when the choreographer and tap dancer lost her grandfather to complications arising from Covid-19 in Brazil.
Steps
2021 / Brazil / 3 min
Recognizing her history and connecting with nature is what drove her to change… Transform… Be different from what she was… Walking with new steps.
Flowing River
2022 / Brazil / 5 min
Inspired by the tale La Llorona from the book “Women who run with the Wolves” by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. This movie express –in the river waters– aspects from our unconscious mind that blocks our creative life.
Maré
2022 / Brazil / 3 min
Maré explores water as a thread of experiences, memories and senses, bringing together research from the past and the present that merge and complement each other. Hula hoops, body and water build small dialogues and imagetic subtleties that take place from the artist’s different approaches and perspectives.
In the Air of the Mountains
2021 / Brazil / 9 min
In the Air of the Mountains is a video dance from the homonymous multidisciplinary artistic project that proposes the creation from the interaction of the body in the natural space. Developed by the dancer and acrobat Cláudia Millás, it gathers elements from dance, circus, vertical techniques and audiovisual, which dialogue with the environment of the Pau D’álho Mountain Range, located in the rural area of Andradas – MG, Brazil. The project was born from the author’s desire to develop ecological thoughts/actions capable of approaching the public and fostering the need for care and responsibility for the space in which we live. Following the transformations of nature, in its movement of variation and repetition, we seek to open paths to more subtle perceptions and the possibility of integrating with the environment from the feeling of belonging to it.
Abracavala
2021 / Brazil / 6 min
She opens ways, opens the doors, go open, open, open the roads, she dances free, she beats the hooves, she winds the mane, she shoots the arrows, go open mare, her heart is blue, all that she fights with, is deep within, she comes so bright, as rays of light, she comes so strong, as faith in love.
Sans Souci Brazil is made possible by: