Seven years after Até Ver a Luz, Basil da Cunha returns to Reboleira to tell this story of returns, endings, a portrait of a youth and a social space. Spira, 18 years old, is back after years in a juvenile detention centre. Friends are still there, so are parties and schemes to make a living. Bulldozers tear down houses in the neighbourhood, Iara in the meantime became a woman, and drug trafficking is both a dream and a nightmare.
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When Spira returns to Reboleira, eight years after his detention, he stands in what remains of the neighborhood he left. But he is not sure what is left of who he was eight years ago in that same place. It is in this duality that he will permanently test others and will be put to the test, especially by Kikas and his self-proclaimed authority as the leader of obscure businesses and supreme defender of the neighborhood and the people. If the city – and the country – already treat Spira as a stranger, where will he find an echo of belonging? The answer is perhaps in all the moments he dedicates to show his interest in Iara. A narrative that lives on the performance of non-professional actors, who add volume to the elegy that Basil da Cunha wishes to make in a space and time that are (not so) slowly disappearing from the urban map. An impure fiction that forces us to think about the reality of the non-places that populate cities, victims of policies that make their poetry ill and cast them in this dark never-ending night. (Mafalda Melo)
When Spira returns to Reboleira, eight years after his detention, he stands in what remains of the neighborhood he left. But he is not sure what is left of who he was eight years ago in that same place. It is in this duality that he will permanently test others and will be put to the test, especially by Kikas and his self-proclaimed authority as the leader of obscure businesses and supreme defender of the neighborhood and the people. If the city – and the country – already treat Spira as a stranger, where will he find an echo of belonging? The answer is perhaps in all the moments he dedicates to show his interest in Iara. A narrative that lives on the performance of non-professional actors, who add volume to the elegy that Basil da Cunha wishes to make in a space and time that are (not so) slowly disappearing from the urban map. An impure fiction that forces us to think about the reality of the non-places that populate cities, victims of policies that make their poetry ill and cast them in this dark never-ending night. (Mafalda Melo)
