Search Film, Company, People...

I M VANETE

EU SOU VANETE

By Shaynna PIDORI

CASA DO SACI AUDIOVISUAL - as PROD

Biography - Post-Production 2025

- Year of production
- 2025
- Genres
- Biography, Female director, Documentary
- Countries
- BRAZIL
- Languages
- BRAZILIAN-PORTUGUESE
- Duration
- 90 mn
- Director(s)
- Shaynna PIDORI
- Producer(s)
- Paulo DELFINI (Casa do Saci Audiovisual)
- Synopsis
- I Am Vanete is a documentary that tells the story of Vanete Almeida (1943-2012), a Black woman from the Brazilian sertão who managed to mobilize rural women in Latin America and the Caribbean through her activism. The main conflicts Vanete faced and the legacy she left behind are explored through the perspective of the director, who also positions herself as a character in the narrative. The film also aims to present reflections on activism, feminism, democracy, and cultural diversity.
  
  The narrative trajectory is constructed in a non-linear fashion through the intertwining of three distinct time flows. The first flow begins in 2005, with the dream of Shaynna Pidori and Priscila Néri to produce an independent feature film about the lives of seven women from the poorest region in Brazil. The two young filmmakers from the Southeast of the country filmed Vanete's daily life at her home in Jatiúca (a district of Santa Cruz da Baixa Verde), as well as her trip to Mexico to coordinate the Second Latin American and Caribbean Rural Women’s Meeting (ENLAC). At that time, the activist was grappling with the dilemma of leaving the country for three months while her 91-year-old mother was ill.
  The second time flow refers to everything that happened before 2005 and is constructed with archival material produced by Vanete during three decades of social struggle: black-and-white photographs, footage from early demonstrations held on March 8th (1982 and 1983), footage from the First State Women’s Meeting (1987), images from the national campaign “No Woman Without a Document” – which led the government to address this issue – and cassette tapes where Vanete spoke about her fight to integrate women into the labor movement and about the issues of drought and hunger in the semi-arid region of Northeast Brazil. It also includes the history of the Brazilian rural labor movement, sexism, and the confrontation with the government in pursuit of public policies aimed at addressing social inequality, such as agrarian reform.
  
  The third flow is based on productions made in 2021 and 2022. In this part, Shaynna and some women who were Vanete's companions in activism evoke her through the writing and reading of letters. The content of these letters reflects some of the changes that have occurred in the world and in the lives of these characters ten years after Vanete’s death. It is worth noting that the selection of these characters aims to reflect ethnic and age diversity, and that some of them currently hold leadership positions thanks to Vanete Almeida's work. The idea is to create a channel of communication between these characters and Vanete. This concept is inspired by the letters the ancient Egyptians wrote to their deceased, and it seeks to promote, in a poetic way, reflections on activism, social movements, feminism, democracy, and the fight for environmental recovery.