The Weekender: The Body Electric

“The Weekender” is our feature where every weekend we hope to highlight a short film, movie or documentary pertaining to the Americas. 

Back in 2013 we highlighted Neighboring Sounds, which we described as a film set in Brazil that “gradually exposes the contradictions, tensions and complex relationships among residents of varying social and economic levels.” The movie marked the feature length directorial debut of Kleber Mendonça Filho who previously examined socioeconomic relations in a 2005 short film called Eletrodomestica. In Eletrodomestica, Filho focused on “mechanics and electricity and consumerism” and was inspired by a peculiar aspect of Brazil’s burgeoning consumer culture in the 1990s:

It came from . . . I think the spark right in the beginning was my family came to the U.S. on holiday in 1991 and on our way back at Miami International Airport, I saw a pyramid of stuff: microwave ovens, and VCRs, and fax machines. This is the stuff the Brazilian tourists were taking back with them, back to Brazil. I thought that it was really kind of absurd, that so much electronic stuff was being taken back to the country.

Please check out Eletrodomestica (with English subtitles) below the page break:



YouTube Source – Future Shorts
 
Online Sources – The Latin Americanist, Bomb Magazine