Memory House

The beast lurks within

From a white screen, an image swims up of a man dressed in a white hygiene suit in a completely white room inside a milk factory. Inside all that white there is a black man, Cristovam, a native from the north of Brazil who has been transplanted to a former Austrian colony in the south. He is a lone figure in this white, white world. One day, he discovers an abandoned house filled with objects that remind him of his origins. As he slowly settles in this house, reason starts to slip away, and the barriers between human and animal become more and more tenuous. For his feature debut, director João Paulo Miranda Maria uses spiritual and fantastical storytelling to encapsulate the social and racial tensions of modern Brazil. This strange, unsettling, yet adventurous film garnered the honour of being selected as the sole Latin American film in Cannes official line-up this year.