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ROYAL COURT

CORTE REAL

By Julia DE SIMONE

ANAVILHANA - as PROD

Drama - Pre-Production 2020

Aywo Agoa is a black woman who was enslaved and forced to come to Brazil in colonial times. She wakes up in 2018 Rio de Janeiro and engages in a search for her twin sister, who is stuck in the city. She needs Aywo to help her to make a passage ritual for her spirit to be in peace.

- Year of production
- 2020
- Genres
- Drama, Historical
- Countries
- BRAZIL, PORTUGAL
- Languages
- BRAZILIAN-PORTUGUESE
- Duration
- 70 mn
- Director(s)
- Julia DE SIMONE
- Writer(s)
- Julia DE SIMONE, Aline PORTUGAL
- Producer(s)
- Luana MELGAÇO (ANAVILHANA), Julia DE SIMONE (MIRADA FILMES), Filipa REIS (UMA PEDRA NO SAPATO)
- Synopsis
- During the past decade, the port region of Rio de Janeiro has been through a gigantic urban reform for the construction of Porto Maravilha. The excavations brought to surface the city's history and past that were lying underground. Among them was Valongo Quay, an ancient buried port that received over one million Africans in only twenty years.
  
  Aywo Agoa emerges in this context. She is a black woman from the Mahi people, and one of the four million Africans who were enslaved and forced to come to Brazil in colonial times. She wakes up from a profound sleep in 2018 Rio de Janeiro, in a colonial palace in ruins, wherein another spectral character lives: a white woman named Catarina Medeiros. She was a Portuguese Dame who came to Brazil in 1808 along with the Royal Court.
  
  Confined in the palace and with no idea what the year is, the relation between madam and slave is immediately restored. The two behave just as before, until Aywo hears a call from her twin sister, who claims for help: she is stuck in the city and stuck in the world, and she needs Aywo to help her to make a passage ritual for her spirit to follow its path in peace.
  
  Aywo manages to free herself from the palace in which she was enslaved and engages in a search for her sister in the port region, reviving black people's memory from inside the city's ground. In her journey, she discovers that her mission is much greater: she has to help not only her sister to cross and make the passage, but all her ancestors that were buried without the ritual and are still stuck in this land.
- Partners & financing
- Hubert Bals Fund (Development);
  Prodecine 05 Fund (Production).