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TEMPO MEIO AZUL PISCINA

MID-BLUE POOL WEATHER

By Sofia FEDERICO

SOLANGE MORAES (INDEPENDENT) - as PROD

Family - Production 2025

Zaila has just lost her daughter during birth. She faces the grief while breast-feeding Hebe’s son, who cannot take care of the baby by herself. Zaila works in a museum, recovering photography through digital restoration. One day she decides to organize a photography album from her own life.

- Year of production
- 2025
- Genres
- Family, Female director, Drama
- Countries
- BRAZIL
- Languages
- PORTUGUESE
- Director(s)
- Sofia FEDERICO
- Synopsis
- Swimming in the Blue tells the story of Zaila, who deals with grief by inventing her own past, while recovering the memories of her city.
  
  The story begins with Zaila being hired to work in her town's Tempostal Museum, restoring old photographs and postcards.
  
  A conflict soon arises between her and her boss, Pedro Normal, because Zaila, when restoring the images, always ends up doing something to them - recreating or recomposing reality. This makes Pedro Normal furious.
  He doesn't know that inventing worlds - or creating a new reality - is the only thing Zaila can do in life nowadays, because her own reality hasn't been easy at all. Zaila is in deep mourning because she has just lost her daughter in childbirth; Dandara was stillborn.
  
  She copes with her grief by breastfeeding Tomás, the son of her neighbor Hebe, who, despite being crazy about the boy, doesn't have the slightest vocation for taking care of him. Hebe can't stand breastfeeding, she doesn't have the patience to be a mother - and all Zaila wants is to be a mother. An interdependent relationship is established between the two neighbors.
  
  This is how Zaila lives her days: she works at the museum, breastfeeds Tomás, donates milk at a breast milk bank near her house and swims in a pool. While she swims, she cries. Nobody sees her crying, as her tears disappear into the water.
  
  When she is alone, Zaila transforms little Tomás into Dandara. The daughter who wasn't born comes to exist in Tomás - dressed in all the clothes from the girl's trousseau, which Zaila insists on keeping.
  Zaila then puts together a photo album with baby Tomás dressed as Dandara. But Hebe discovers the album and breaks off relations with Zaila. Also at the museum, the relationship with Pedro Normal deteriorates and Zaila is fired.
  
  Throughout the movie, Zaila tries to recover a photograph from 1900, from the time of colonial Brazil. The image has been practically erased. All that can be seen is a five-year-old boy, sitting on the lap of a figure, whose skirt is long and whose feet are shod.
  At the peak of the crisis, Zaila finally manages to recover the back and face of the woman in the photo, and is confronted with her own face. In the picture, the woman, an old milkmaid from the past, smiles in a restrained manner.
  
  Hebe and Zaila resume their friendship and the relationship of mutual support and interdependence is re-established.
  In peace, Zaila throws herself into the sea and swims towards an infinite and full horizon.