26 min. Portuguese.
Jogos Dirigidos creates a language experience. In the Várzea Queimada community, located in the Sertão of Piauí, the backcountry of the northeastern Brazilian state, a place with about 900 inhabitants and a high rate of deaf population, access to water and public investment is scarce, as is the learning of Libras, the official Brazilian sign language. In the face of all these limitations, Várzea Queimada’s deaf community created their own language.
The film features body and speech exercises and an improvised outdoor stage for spontaneous testimonials from a group of 18 local characters, men and women. Most of the statements, many of them untranslated, are revised phrase by phrase, linking gestures to words and systematizing Várzea Queimada’s gestural lexicon as if we were facing an educational video that teaches a new language, beyond its universe and its own questions.
Jonathas de Andrade, born in 1982 in Maceió, Brazil, lives and works in Recife. He uses photography, installation, and video to traverse collective memory and history, making use of strategies that shuffle fiction and reality. He collects and catalogues architecture, images, texts, life stories and recomposes a personal narrative of the past. His work has been shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions in museums and art institutions.
