Jotuomba is a fictitious village located in Vale do Paraiba, Brazil, where rich coffee plantation went bankrupt, and once wealthy villages practically became ghost towns. The city is inhabited by a few older residents who lived within the memories of those relatives who have already passed away and are buried in the only cemetery in town, which is currently locked.
Magdalena, the baker, lives here. Her life is an endless repetition of the same routine - which starts with making bread early in the morning and ends with writing a letter to her dead husband every night. One day Rita, a young photographer, arrives. The encounter of two different cultures and generations gradually changes Magdalena’s routine. Rita discovers that Jotuomba is an undying village since the cemetery was closed. Magdalena, willing to die, is unable to do so. When Rita opens the cemetery, Magdalena allows herself to die.
But, now, someone needs to make the bread.
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Director's statement
“Let the old dying ones give way to the new dying ones” was created after I visited Forte Coimbra, a distant military fort located in rural Brazil, where the cemetery has been closed for many years. I visited the fort, and the small town that surround it, in 1999, while shooting “Brava Gente Brasileira,” and since then I have dreamed of writing a script about an old woman who must live with the impossibility of being buried in her hometown.Through my father’s memories, small towns, and their ghost stories, have pursued me since I was a child. He grew up in a small town named Bananal in rural São Paulo state, where, much like a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, my grandfather, a wealthy farmer, went bankrupt because of a crooked accountant. Until I was 15 years old, I spent almost every weekend and holiday in this town, visiting with my grandparents, and reminiscing about the time when my family lost everything. The film is set in a similar environment: where there are almost no houses left; where carcasses of dead animals are children’s playthings; and the elderly, live their lives in the town’s only bar, drinking cachaça (sugarcane liquor) to forget the tragedy and solitude of their lives. This environment is immortalized in the story of Vale do Paraiba, so well told in the ‘30s by Monteiro Lobato, so deeply forgotten nowadays. Lobato was amazed, if amazed is the right word, by those ghost towns where, “What once was, is now nothing. There can be no conjugation in the present tense, only in the past.” And, nowadays there are ruined palaces “…where the ants reign and their allies are the dry plants.” This film works to reconstruct this environment that is so alive in our memory, or maybe we should say, so dead? The original proposal for this project completely changed throughout the creation of the script. From this idea of the impossibility of being buried in her hometown, I created a town where no one can die. By luck, Maria Clara Escobar was kind enough to embark on a project that was not hers with the freedom (and the courage) to transform it into her own. We traveled together to Madrid where we participated in “IV Curso de desarrollo de proyectos cinematográficos Iberoamericanos, 2006,” developed by Casa América. After two-months of discussions with José Carlos Avellar (Brasil) and Jorge Goldenberg (Argentina), we returned to Rio de Janeiro and invited Felipe Sholl to help us create the dialogues for these elderly characters.When I started developing this script I intended to talk about the possibility of seeing death as liberation. Today, I still believe in death as liberation, but in the process, I discovered the imprisonment of those who are left behind. In the film, an elderly woman frees herself through death, but as a consequence, she abandons a young lady trapped in a life that is not hers. Like a vampire, Magdalena seduces a young woman, named Rita, to live the same life that suffocated her. Rita will need to deal with the call and obligation of tradition: someone needs to make the bread. Likewise, what are we, the post-utopist generation, for whom there are no dreams, yet we continue dreaming, to do with these traditions? This is the question that remains.
Credits
Production company: Taiga Filmes e Video
Director: Julia Murat
Line-producer: Lucia Murat / Marília Nogueira
Script: Julia Murat / Maria Clara Escobar
Dialogues: Felipe Sholl