The Film
The Margin of Color
Upon finding a self-portrait of my grandmother Divina, a Black lady who painted herself white, I embark on a journey of colonial healing and self-reinvention. The narrative traces from the Eurocentric image to a Freudian slip, racist laws, audible noises, and memories emerging from therapeutic processes, akin to a stream of consciousness.
Mariana
Luiza
Director
Mariana enjoys listening to and telling stories. Since her adolescence, she has written short stories and chronicles, having won awards in Brazil, Austria, and Portugal. Her writing and her work in cinema are related to identity, belonging, and colonialism. In 2023, she created and directed the immersive installation “Redenção,” which was selected for the immersive documentaries competition at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, IDFA. Mariana directed the fiction short film "Casca de Baobá" (2017, BIFF) and the documentary series "Enigma da Energia Escura" (2021, GNT/Globoplay).
She has written scripts for films and streaming projects for production companies such as Prêta Portê Filmes, Conspiração Filmes, and Coqueirão Pictures.
Mariana holds a degree in Screenwriting from the New York Film Academy (2008, NYC) and in Editing from the Darcy Ribeiro Film School (2018, RJ). She is a member of APAN - Associação dos Profissionais do Audiovisual Negro (BR) and AAWIC - African American Women In Cinema (USA), as well as being part of Talento Paradiso (BR).
Intention note
"The history of Brazil is schizophrenic"
My grandmother Divina, when she was young, a self-portrait watercolor from a black and white photograph. In the photo, Divina has Black skin, nappy hair and a wide nose, just like her African ancestors. But in the watercolor painted by her, she portrays herself with skin white as milk, a thin nose and straight hair, slightly wavy while I, until then, had not perceived such a blaring distinction between fiction and reality.
In On Photography , Susan Sontag writes: “The painter constructs, the photographer discloses”, and it is starting with the construction of my grandmother’s self-portrait that I set out in search of the revelation of my own identity.
Why did it take me so many years to perceive the racial misrepresentation in my grandmother's self-portrait?
I understand now that my inability to find strange the whitened image of Divina, with whom I spent a significant part of my childhood and my early adulthood, is a reflection of the”whiteness” that dwells in my subjectivity.
A whiteness that colonized my desires, whitened the way I looked at the world and myself, and fragmented any attempt at building an affirmative Black self-image within me. I wasn’t able to confront the whiteness codes in Divina’s watercolor because, deep down, I desired those features for myself. The paint that materialized that delirious whiteness in my grandmother’s self-portrait is likewise diluted into the homogeneous portrait of a sick and excluding country.
The racial alienation experienced by my family is quite common among mixed-race Brazilian families, which represent 46.7% of the population (self-declared as "parda"). Driven by the desire to understand the denial of my Black identity, I began, in 2018, a research project on the role of the State in the invention of a Brazilian national identity. I directed the research towards the legislations and state actions that contributed to the phenotypic and cultural annihilation of Black people, one of the most violent expressions of the whitening policy in Brazilian society, starting from the nation-state management in the first half of the 19th century. The film was born from this research, and it intends to investigate my own identity construction in parallel with questioning the concepts of "nation," "Brazilianness," and "Brazilian people."
How does this single, homogeneous, white, Eurocentric, and colonial national identity affect the unconscious and the minds of Black people in this country nowadays?
Production
NGONGO Filmes was created by Mariana Luiza with the goal of producing art and education projects in multiple languages, related to issues of race and belonging. Over the years, the production company has provided services for Bananeira Filmes, Preta Portê Filmes, Conspiração Filmes, and Coqueirão Pictures.In 2024, it produced the art exhibition. Constituinte do Brasil Possível, at Centro Cultural Correios, Rio de Janeiro. In 2023, it produced the immersive video installation "Redenção" (26 min), which premiered at the IDFA - International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, and was subsequently exhibited at Garage Rotterdam (2024). In 2017, it produced the fiction short film "Casca de Baobá" (12 min). The project was awarded in the SAv/Minc - Curta Afirmativo public notice (2014). "Casca de Baobá" was screened at several festivals in Brazil and around the world, receiving six awards. In 2010, the company produced the medium-length film "A B Ser" (52 min). The project was awarded in the Filma Brasil public notice (Lei Rouanet). The film was licensed to the Futura channel.
NGONGO Filmes is the producer of the transmedia project Linha de Cor and the exhibition Constituinte do Brasil Possível.
Carapiá Filmes was born in 2020 out of the desire to make movies in a collaborative and human way. In our productions, we seek to boost emerging women directors with the aim of producing films based on new ideas and perspectives. We are interested in projects led by historically invisible people and with themes that have a strong artistic, political and social appeal.
We have released a short film, Rio Vermelho, as well as co-producing three other films: The Secret of Sikán, winner of best project in development at Brasil CineMundi in 2021, included in the FSA New Directors 2022 Fund and Hubert Bals Fund Development 2022; The Margin of Color, which has already participated in important laboratories such as DOCSP (Brazil), Biobio Chile (Chile), DocMontevideo (Uruguay), and received support from RioFilmes 2022; Maestra, by Bruna Piantino, is scheduled to be released in 2024. In 2023 we premiered the immersive video installation Redemption, by Mariana Luiza, at IDFADOC Lab.
Fernanda Vidigal
Fernanda Vidigal is a creative and executive producer with a degree in Film and Audiovisual from Centro Universitário UNA (2014) and a specialization in Film Production from the Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV (EICTV) in Cuba (2020). She is a member of APAN – Associação de Profissionais do Audiovisual Negro [Association of Black Film Professionals]. In 2019, she attended an event in Colombia, receiving support from the Paradiso Project, as part of this program’s talent network. In 2020 she took part in Berlinale Talents Guadalajara (Mexico) and in 2021 she was part of the Brazilian committee in the Visitors Programme at the EFM – Berlinale (Germany).
She has been an Official Jury at festivals, a speaker at various institutions and schools, as well as being part of the BrLab 2020 selection committee. From 2013 to 2024, she worked on ten feature-length fiction, animation and documentary films in the production department. She recently executive produced the feature films Praia Formosa, O silêncio das Ostras, and Ana, en passant. She is the founder of the company Carapiá Filmes, which focuses on developing projects with women directors, as well as promoting training activities in cinema, such as SemanaLab - a training space and laboratory for the development of projects by black people from Belo Horizonte and the Metropolitan Region.
Credits
Produtoras Production Company:
Ngongo Filmes; Carapiá Filmes
Co-produção Co-Production:
Rio Filmes
Diretora Director:
Mariana Luiza
Produtores/as Producers:
Fernanda Vidigal; Mariana Luiza
Roteirista Screenplay:
Luiz Santana; Mariana Luiza
Pesquisadores Searchers:
Ana Flávia Magalhães, Bruna Portella, Fernanda Lima, Itan Cruz, Amélia Zarife, Stephane Ramos e Thula Pires
Diretor de Fotografia Director of Photography:
Flávio Rebouças
Duração Duration:
90 min
Idioma Language:
Português | Portuguese
Versões Internacionais Int’l versions:
Espanhol e Inglês
Paths of the Film: Labs and Market
Editais, Prêmios e Apoios Funds, Awards and Supports
Rumos Itaú Cultural 2019-2020, Brasil
Rio Filmes - Edital Desenvolvimento 2022 - Brasil
Laboratórios Labs
Visões Periféricas - 2018, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
Nordic Lab - 2019, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
Diáspora Lab - 2020, Salvador, Brasil
Biobio Lab - 2021, BioBio, Chile
Doc Society/DOCSP - documentários de impacto, 2021, São Paulo, Brasil
Filma Afro, 2022, Cartagena, Colômbia
Mercados Markets
DOCSP - 2018, São Paulo, Brasil
Brasil CineMundi, 2020, Belo Horizonte, Brasil
DOCSUR - MiradasDoc, 2021, Tenerife, Espanha.
FICCali - VI Salón de Productores y Proyectos Cinematográficos, 2021, Cali, Colômbia
FICG – Festival Internacional de Cine de Guadalajara, 2022, Guadalajara, México.
Doc Montevideo, 2022, Montevideo, Uruguai
Sheffield DocFest, 2023, Sheffield, Reino Unido
Marché du film de Cannes, 2024, Cannes, França
