After the Silence

Slavery, at least in its large-scale industrial form, as part of a colonial project, is generally considered today as something from another era, a deplorable chapter in history that has been closed.

In After the Silence / Depois do silêncio Brazilian theatre and filmmaker Christiane Jatahy connects it to today, zooming in on its huge impact on the world we live in and its geopolitical realities, on the personal lives of many millions of inhabitants of this planet unrooted by history, on their quest of a territory – in its most concrete sense of a land, but also in its broadest definition of an identity, as a person, a community, a culture.

After the Silence / Depois do silêncio unrolls around the fiction of Torto Arado (2019), the widely acclaimed novel by Itamar Vieira Junior, set in a rural context in the interior of Bahia.

It connects this unsettling fiction – narrated through the voices of three women against the background of their community’s struggle for land, freedom, and identity – to Cabra marcado para morrer, the famous documentary by Eduardo Coutinho and its unraveling of the story of João Pedro Teixeira, leader of a rural union assassinated in 1962; and to research based on fieldwork and interviews.

A documentary/fiction, a play/film as an intimate account of this unresolved past that keeps repeating itself in the horrors of Bolsonaro’s Brazil and beyond. As an attempt to connect present to past, in the hope to clear a ground for the future.

After the Silence / Depois do silênciois the third and final part of the trilogy of horror.

In recent years, Brazil has begun a flirtation with an extreme right-wing regime, endangering the very recently conquered democracy. Faced with the urgency of the situation in her homeland, it was clear to Christiane Jatahy that her art – the expression of a continuous exploration of the boundaries between cinema and theater, between fiction and reality, between inertia and the need for change – would be a weapon in the struggles that would need to be fought.

With After the Silence / Depois do silêncio, Christiane Jatahy deepens her research into a theatrical and cinematographic language, exploring the tension lines between both art forms; between fiction and reality; between the local issues of her native Brazil and the way these are reverberations of global tendencies; between a profound preoccupation with the dark times both country and world are living and the hope that change might come.

After the Silence / Depois do silêncio was created in Rio de Janeiro, and filmed in Bahia’s Chapada Diamantina, with the landscapes and characters of the novel Torto Arado.