I have had the great pleasure of working with Carolina Kzan on Panis et Circences. Working on this with a wonderful cast was a very moving experience.

Carolina: “The idea of ​​making this film came during the presidential election process in Brazil. As a Brazilian, I had to look, stupefied, the political and, above all, social processes that marked last year. So, nothing more natural than to bring out all these feelings in a movie. Obviously, I do not speak of a concrete place. This place has no GPS coordinates, but it is a fairly nuanced space, in which we lose sight of the barriers between reality and the imaginary and this feeling is reinforced by the mix of images and images, real sounds and staging: a whole system sitting behind a table and surrounded by paperwork; a “plague” which represents a sort of banality of evil, for which the action of crying is no less mechanical than taking a shower or packing laptops in a production line; four women in underwear (the standardised “flesh” color, despite the amount of melanin); a museum filled with “dolls”; sequins, a grotesque choreography that has marked a historic moment in my country; the past (1964) and the present intersect and mingle in a frightening step of two. Nothing is shown randomly, because they are all part of a ride of horrors trotting, for some time, in my head. To close, this cinematographic space is as well my head and my country at the same time, encrusted in a dark room, a little like the torture rooms used during the first Brazilian dictatorship. However, instead of showing physical violence as we know it, I decided to show it as it is now: we celebrate as if everything were fine; people “of good”, instead of taking responsibility for their actions and consequences, decide to either cross their arms and ally themselves with extremism, or pretend not to see this. which happens before the eyes.”

Idea, camera, montage: Carolina Kzan
Choreography: Irene van Zeeland
Produced by: Omaro Productions