About The Girl and the Pot

The advent of a new world lies at the core of this dystopian tale that asserts women’s power loudly and clearly. To conjure up this rebirth, Valentina Homem relies on magnificent cosmogonic visions transcended by the gripping material effects of glass painting.  Told by the spellbinding voice of the female narrator speaking Nheengatu, this age-old sounding tale takes place in an increasingly threatening environmental threat, but wants to believe in a possibility to save the past to reinvent the future.

Valentina Homem’s interview

The film relies on a powerful script, which you wrote yourself. Where does it come from and what cultural references and symbols does it evoke?

The script was developed from a short story I wrote back in 2012, The Tale of The Void. A parable born out of a cathartic attempt to translate experiences I had in my early adulthood. 

Some of the symbols that organize the narrative are metaphors to personal episodes in my life: the pot, the breaking of it, the void inside it, the loss of contours, the search for a lid and the final integration with the void inside the pot. Years later, I was investigating about Amerindian cosmogony and experimenting with Amazonian Sacred Plants, and realized how the trajectory of the Girl mirrored, somehow, that of a shamanic initiation. In the film, I wanted to imbue the story with symbols that rooted the girl in an Amerindian culture. So I invited the Indigenous anthropologist Francy Baniwa to be a narrative consultant and collaborator in the script. Besides the references to Baniwa cosmology, the script has some influence from Davi Kopenawa Yanonmi's seminal book The Falling Sky.

It's in the Nheengatu language. What can you tell us about this language and this choice? What is your connection to the indigenous peoples of Brazil who use this language?

Nheengatu, or Lingua Geral, was developed from an indigenous language under European influence in the 16th century, and became then the most spoken language in Brazilian territory. It was later forbidden but remained the main language of some indigenous groups in Alto Rio Negro region. The Girl speaks Nheengatu because that is Francy Baniwa's mother language. Because of our partnership in the film, Francy and I became collaborators in a women's project in her community, Assunção do Içana: Amaronai: menstrual dignity and income generation, which is symbolically and politically connected to some aspects of the film.

Can you tell us about your animation technique, which is a fireworks display of colors and material?

The paint on glass technique used in the film reflects the Girl's journey as it is also in constant transformation, allowing fluidity, melting and contours’ loss. We chose the technique mainly because of the possibility to work with traces, which are explored in a crescendo: in the two first acts we increasingly give clues to what will predominate further in the third act - a permanent metamorphosis that connects everything into one single whole.

Your film is not just beautiful; it also conveys a strong message around a feminine cosmogony and the possibility of creating another world. This gives it a distinctly political significance. Could you say a few words about this?

The film is born in the midst of the continuous present dystopia in which we live: the end of the world is now, not in the distant future. The Amazon rainforest is dangerously close to the point of no return, will we only realize it when there is nothing left to see? I invoke writer Eliane Brum, “I want a living life and I want to stay alive, so I join the midwives of a world where we can live”. The film is the fruit of our collective dreaming: dreaming of the forest, being the forest - rescuing ancestral memories, which conserves what is to come. The Amerindian mythologies, contrary to Western thinking, do not conceive of a world without us, so I think of our time as a pre-cosmogonic era, but it's urgent to reforest our imaginaries.