We are a female creative duo living in the Brazilian diaspora, and we are interested in discussing the space of an ugly film, made in a country that exports beauty. ESCASSO is the first short film of a trilogy we call “decolonial melodramas”. In this film, we tell backwards the story of Rose, a woman who goes into a state of outburst when faced with a traumatic event. In this first film, created, written and acted by Clara Anastácia – we debate housing and food insecurity through a debauched and imaginative mockumentary. For this, we propose a direct dialogue with Glauber Rocha’s aesthetics of hunger, through our own point of view. A deliberately aggressive film. But also a film committed to bring the affections around a black and marginal body in Brazil, in the city of Rio de Janeiro. What is the aesthetics of a homeless and hungry country?
Inspired by Brazilian peripheral digital influencers, in which there is a political but not politicized speech, Rose presents her new house to a documentary crew while celebrating the realization of a dream: living in a safe and silent place, with food on the table and the possibility of rest. With the protagonist, we propose a body that dismantles a white Western system of documentary making. Her verbal and apparently disconnected speech is, in fact, the way we try to debate social themes: in a way that our mothers and grandmothers understand. Currently, 41% of the Brazilian population is living on food insecurity, and poverty levels are only increasing. Paraphrasing the author Maria Carolina de Jesus, with the film we fight today, in 2022, against the current slavery: hunger.