Finding Norma

FINDING NORMA is a multi-screen video installation that approaches the life and work of Brazilian lesbian filmmaker Norma Bahia Pontes (1941–2010) through the traces that remain and through the absences produced by her disappearance from film history. Norma’s practice moved across countries, political movements, and cinematic forms, from Cinema Novo in Brazil and anticolonial filmmaking in France to lesbian feminist video in 1970s New York. Through an experimental montage, artist and filmmaker Lívia Perez brings Norma’s films and videos into dialogue with footage of Perez’s own encounters with Norma’s dispersed archives across Brazil, the United States, and France. Approaching the archive as a living and unstable space in which images can return, absences can become visible, and new affinities can emerge, the installation reflects on what it means to search for an artist through an incomplete archival record and to encounter a body of work that has been largely erased from dominant histories of cinema. As the encounter unfolds, Perez opens a dialogue between two generations of Latin American women filmmakers across borders and time.

Credits
Artist: Lívia Perez
Producer: Giovanni Francischelli
Co-editor: Henrique Cartaxo
Script Consultant: Eri Sarmet
Archives: Rita Moreira and Norma Bahia Pontes Archives, courtesy of Rita Moreira
Artwork on Film Strip: Leila Monsegur
Analog Photography / Film Development: Gustavo Lemos
Additional Photography: Flora Correia, Livia Sá, Rhaissa Monteiro
Additional Sound: Paula Sacchetta

Special Thanks
Rita Moreira, for generously providing access to her and Norma Bahia Pontes’s archives, and Esther Hamburger, B. Ruby Rich, Isaac Julien, and Mark Nash, whose critical engagement and generous contributions were essential to bringing the project into material form.

With support from
Doctela
Digital Arts and New Media Program
Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas
University of California, Santa Cruz

Artist Biography
Lívia Perez is a Brazilian filmmaker, artist, and researcher working across documentary, experimental cinema, and archival practices. Her work engages with memory, gender, sexuality, and the ways images endure, disappear, and return through archives. Moving between filmmaking and research, she is interested in the encounters that emerge through archival work and in cinema’s capacity to reactivate histories obscured from view. Finding Norma grows from Perez’s ongoing engagement with the films, archives, and legacy of Brazilian filmmaker Norma Bahia Pontes, bringing archival research into conversation with her own experience as a filmmaker across generations and geographies.

About Norma Bahia Pontes
Norma Bahia Pontes (1941–2010) was a Brazilian filmmaker, video artist, critic, and essayist whose singular trajectory unfolded across Brazil, France, and the United States. An important voice in the emergence of Cinema Novo, she moved between film criticism, theory, and filmmaking before turning, in early 1970s New York, toward portable video. There, alongside filmmaker Rita Moreira and within the lesbian feminist movement, she created a pioneering body of work attentive to women’s lives, sexuality, and alternative ways of living. Moving across languages, technologies, and political contexts, Pontes left behind a transnational body of work whose dispersed traces continue to expand the histories of Brazilian, feminist, and queer moving images.

Further Reading

Perez, Lívia. “From Cinema Novo to Lesbian Feminist Video: The Trajectory of Norma Bahia Pontes.” Rebeca: Brazilian Journal of Cinema and Audiovisual Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, 2020, pp. 20–45.

Perez, Lívia. “Findings in the Closet: The Film and Video Archives of Norma Bahia Pontes.” Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas, 2025.