PRESS RELEASE

—Documentary film—

Logline

Pedra, peixe, rio explores the meaning of loss through the extraordinary story of
Ariana, a young Brazilian girl.

Synopsis

Pedra, peixe, rio: Itamatatiua is a very personal film which explores loss through a
variety of styles: part observational, part fictitious reconstruction, and part dreamlike
fiction. Set in a small, slave-descendant Brazilian community called Itamatatiua, the
film follows the life of Ariana, a foster child, her foster mother Eloisa, and the
filmmaker Iban, over a three-year period.

Director’s Note (Iban Ayesta)

The film Pedra, peixe, rio: Itamatatiua stems from fieldwork I carried out in northern
Brazil. During the time I spent in the state of Marañao between January 2004 and
March 2006, I spent my time between the city of San Luis and Itamatatiua, a slave-
descendant settlement of approximately five hundred inhabitants, located in the
southern part of the municipality of Alcántara. On my arrival as a researcher I was
welcomed warmly into the community lead by a circle of eight sturdy ceramicists and
invited to stay in the house of the only ceramicist who had never had children, Eloisa
De Jesús.
On moving into Eloisa’s home, I discovered that the charming lady lived with
someone else; a slim, shy eight-year-old black girl who, at the end of the day, would
become the central character in the documentary. Ariana Sodré Damaceno came from
the capital of Marañao, San Luis, and had been recently taken into care in Elosia’s
home. The girl Ariana, without uttering a word to me (I spoke an almost
incomprehensible form of Portuguese), waved her hands about expressively and
comically to show me the prettiest areas of the village. The natural spring Chora –
where the inhabitants of Itamatatiua filled up their water jugs every day– and the
winding river that gave the village its name, where naked children played, were just
two of these Eden-like places. I came to an agreement with the eight ceramicists: I
would make a feature-length documentary film in exchange for humanitarian service
and transport for the community.

In this way, these three people –Eloisa De Jesús, Ariana Sodré Damasceno and I–
lived under the same roof, forming a makeshift family. The documentary is based on
this relationship. Destiny, always enigmatic, appears to have given rise to this
makeshift family, made of three people from different places. And yet the three of us
had something in common that linked us intimately; Eloisa, Ariana and I had all
experienced separation –in one form or another– from our mothers. This particular
feature made the cinematographic experiment not just cross, but also, radically
challenge cultural boundaries.

Itamatatiua: The Land of Saint Theresa of Ávila

The village of Itamatatiua is a slave-descendant community located in the

municipality of Alcántara, in the state of Marañao, in northern Brazil. It is a tropical
settlement of approximately 550 inhabitants who work mainly in growing crops,
raising livestock, hunting and gathering, and fishing. These Afro-descendant families
have lived in the lush terrain of Itamatatiua for more than two centuries, creating and
developing without any state aid a complex social organization shaped by ethnically
rooted elements. The Tupinambá Indians lived in this Amazonian settlement until the
Portuguese conquered the area in the 16th century. The violent invasion of these lands
led to the deaths and flight of many of their indigenous inhabitants. After colonizing
Itamatatiua, the Portuguese populated the area with slaves from Black Africa and
founded a religious estate run by the Barefoot Carmelites. Subordinate to the Order of
Saint Theresa, the mostly African Bantu slaves were catechized by force and suffered
cruel exploitation.

In similar fashion to other indigenous and Afro-descendant areas of Brazil,

Itamatatiua still has no legal status regarding the ownership of its lands. While the
Brazilian Constitution has provided for the right of ownership for ethnic territories
since 1989, this legislation has still not been put into effect. The village inhabitants
respectfully keep a stone carved by the Carmelite Father Colonny. Its inscription –
without any current legal validity– records the handing over of the lands of Saint
Theresa of the Carmelites to their former slaves after they departed. The village has
kept its original name in the Guaraní language of its former Tupinambá inhabitants –
Itamatatiua– which, etymologically, means piedra, pez, río (stonefish river).

Pedra, peixe, río

Pedra – Uprooting

Through my relationship with Ariana I have come to understand her personality and
in doing so, I have also come across cracks, silences and gaps that are also part of her
world. They are the most personal experiences of Ariana’s life and, just like tonal and
temporal interludes in music, they are strong enough to take complete control of her
life at certain moments. Because of this, I have tried to demonstrate these through
images as best I can. For two and a half years I undertook to capture the hidden
aspects of the saudades that Ariana went through towards her mother Laura. In order
to do so I filmed Ariana as someone who is constantly exploring her individuality.
Itamatatiua, shaped by the contrast between its tropical exuberance and substantial
isolation, was an ideal place to elaborate a melancholic poetics. In fact, uprooting is
one of the most obvious features of the social and political history of Itamatatiua: the
elimination of the Tupinambá Indians, the establishment of a religious order, the
repopulation of the village with slaves of Bantu origin, the veneration for a Spanish
saint who never set foot in the Americas, the participation of Itamatatiua’s inhabitants
in the war between Brazil and Paraguay in the 19th century, and the installation of an
aerospace base in Alcántara, expropriating half the municipality, in 1986. Every one
of the tributaries, homes, fields, yards, daily tasks, gestures and faces of Itamatatiua
offered me a means of exploring the universal experience of human loss.

Peixe – Between Documentary and Fiction

The odd key that locates this film between documentary and fiction is that, because I
lived under the same roof as Eloisa and Ariana, I wrote scenes based on real events,
situations and incidents that happened in our lives. Those I felt most relevant I shared
with Eloisa and Ariana, and if we really thought they were significant in regard to the
theme of uprooting, we began to rehearse them. This procedure allowed me to film
with a high degree of control in the fields of camerawork and mise-en-scène. With the
exception of the dreamlike scenes and direct observation, almost all the scenes in the
film were based on events that happened in the village by the same social actors.
As a result of this creative process, we the protagonists became our own doubles, but
also the village itself became a mirror-like reflection. However, in the documentary
there are also absolute facts that imposed perhaps insurmountable limits on this
experimental work method. Loved ones are abandoned, crucial decisions are made
that might affect our future, and there are tragic deaths that might catch us so
crushingly unaware that there is little option but to acknowledge what happened and
resist. In certain situations in life no mirror can help.

Río – Cross cultural

The insistence in Piedra, peixe, río on clarifying the filming process allows one to
observe that cultural differences are neither unchanging nor absolute. In fact, this
feature-length documentary argues that the similarity between the protagonists may
be more socially meaningful than their cultural differences. What excites me about
this ethnographic experiment is studying in depth the documentary as a work that
engages with the world, that actively confronts reality and that, in so doing, is
transformed into a sort of investigation of itself. I realize that, understood this way,
the documentary is less an act of communication than a form of engaging with the
world. It is, then, a process which favours experience over explanation and that
proceeds more by implication than demonstration. This labour implicates the
character, the spectator, and the filmmaker in an active way.

Biofilmography of Iban Ayesta

Iban Ayesta Aldanondo is a filmmaker located currently in Donostia-San Sebastián.

In 2003 he received a doctorate in anthropology from University College, London
(with the thesis “Berlin, Fin de Millennium: An Experiment in Corporeal
Ethnography”). Between 2000 and 2003, he produced and directed three short films:
Ginger, Hilotzaren Begietan and Alabama, where he collaborated with Moztu Filmak,
Sonora Estudios, the Teatro Imaginario (Bilbao) and the Babelsberg (Berlin) Film
School. In 2004 the Basque Government awarded him a postdoctoral grant to
undertake anthropological research in northern Brazil. He lived in the state of
Marañao for two and a half years, where he filmed the documentary Pedra, peixe, rio:
Itamatatiua. Between 2007 and 2009 he wrote, together with the scriptwriter Iñigo
Yurre, three feature-length scripts: Agua de Luna, Cámara Quimera and Azalpean.
The latter received script development aid from the Basque Government in 2008.
These three projects have been supervised by the script editor Javier Cillero. He has
taught anthropology at the University of Deusto, the Universidad Nacional de
Educación a Distancia (UNED – The National University of Distance Education),
Udako Euskal Unibertsitatea (UEU – The Basque Summer University), and the
University of the Basque Country. In 2009 he formed the film production company,
Emana Films, S.L., together with Iñigo Yurre. Currently, he is working on Azalpean,
a feature-length fiction film co-produced by Emana Films and Sonora Estudios, and
developing a script for a romantic comedy with the scriptwriter Miren Juaristi of
Moztu Filmak.

LIST OF CREDITS

Script and Director: Iban Ayesta

Executive Production: Iurre Telleria and Paco Ruiz
Editing: Enara Goikoetxea
Music: Joaquim Santos and Pascal Gaigne
Sound Design: Martín Guridi

Title: Pedra, peixe, río: Itamatatiua

Format: Digital Betacam, 16:9, colour
Duration: 70’
A co-production of Moztu Filmak and Sonora Estudios

With the participation of:

Ariana Sodré Damaceno

Eloisa de Jesús
Iban Ayesta
Teandra de Jesús
Sheila de Jesús

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