Portrait of the Father at 71

Overview

A film that boldly ventures into realms of intimacy that cinema rarely addresses so directly. Its creator, Dr. Diego Semerene – a non-binary Brazilian filmmaker and scholar of queer media at the University of Amsterdam – made a film essay twenty years ago as a deeply personal conversation with his father about growing up, sexuality and the search for masculinity. Their father had never seen this until now, watching it for the first time as a 71-year-old man. The film returns to that material, confronting the past with the present through an extraordinarily honest dialogue between father and child. It is a story about a queer childhood in Brazil, about the emotional tension between the desire for acceptance and personal identity, and about how memory and family intertwine with our deepest longings. Hypnotic, demanding and remarkably brave cinema that invites a conversation about the boundaries of intimacy.