Ecstasy

Clara moves from the outskirts of São Paulo to Brasilia with her mother, a newly elected congresswoman. Studying in a religious school and fearing for her mother’s safety, Clara develops a system to control her feelings: repetitive measuring of her weight, running to exhaustion and visualizing a blue dot to avoid eating. Clara narrates her story in a non-linear, sometimes third-person perspective, as if seeing her body from the outside. Her personal struggles with desire and pleasure slowly merge with her perceptions of the places surrounding her. The extreme functionalism of Brasilia’s architecture and its strict empty spaces are a metaphor for Clara’s body, while she sees herself as an inhabitable space where nothing comes in or goes out.

Combining personal and public archives, Moara Passoni blurs the borders between fiction and documentary. Set in the nineties, a period of turbulent protests and political instability after the Brazilian dictatorship, Ecstasy is a sensitive portrait of a young woman’s strategies to cope with insecurities, fear and loneliness.