Agua Forte by Monica Baptista (PRT)

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Agua Forte (2018)
Monica Baptista (PRT)

16mm / color / sound / 15′ 15

ÁGUA FORTE is a film made on a trip to the Amazon rainforest (from February to May 2015), preserving a trace of a series of encounters. Made according to a structural plan, this film consists of 5 reels of 16mm hand-processed film and lasts approximately 15 minutes. In the beginning of the film we listen to the Creation myth of the Corripaco, an indigenous people of the Amazon (Brazil, Colombia and Peru), in which the first God, the God Principle, living in a vertical and silent world, sees his excrements emerge from the deep waters – the navel of the world. STRONG WATERS follows the course of a river, intersecting different temporalities: the mythological and the essay – typical of travel journals –, composing a horizontal reflection, like a landscape, and finally collapsing into a wild object born from the unconscious.
A sensory, immersive composition takes us on a journey to a place that seems to have stopped in time but remains timeless. A female voice reads a mythological text on the origin of the world and sets the tone for a documentary-meditation on the presence of primeval elements – like water and flora – and their cohabitation with the natives, whose portraits intersperse the film. The stealthy camera follows a boat drifting across the calm waters of a river, as if the latter were the rings of a tree disclosing its history, in a movement that lulls us and drives us to the physical and metaphysical core. Finally, accompanied by an ancestral chant, the etching gives way to a sequence of images (which in turn emerge like a river reducing the field of action to the essential) and moves into a poetic terrain, summoning the imagination of each one.