Part of my coverage of the 56th Chicago International Film Festival.
MEMORY HOUSE **1/2
IDEA: A Black factory worker in a speculative, contemporary-colonial southern Brazil faces oppression from his employers and neighbors.
BLURB: Legacies of cultural imperialism come up against Indigenous myth and subaltern histories in Memory House, Joāo Paulo Miranda Maria's tantalizing, sometimes heavy-handed feature debut. Mixing realism, folklore, and quasi-futuristic imagery - most notably, the antiseptic, spaceship-like environs of a global milk production facility - the director creates an unsettling social allegory for modern-day Brazil. Colonialism endures in the form of an Austrian colony, which has taken over the southern part of the country with a capitalist stranglehold; white supremacy, xenophobia, and economic inequity run rampant, terrorizing Black factory worker Cristovam in ways both big and small. Miranda Maria unravels this speculative, magical-realist portrait in slow, creeping zooms and eerie nocturnal tableaux, casually introducing and expanding nightmarish details, until Cristovam can silently bear his oppression no longer. Memory House is not subtle in how it links its protagonist to the actual cattle his employers milk and, at one point, indifferently slaughter, nor is it coy in aligning him with nature and mysticism, provoking sometimes dubious primitivist associations. The film is most affecting during its sparer, thickly atmospheric moments, when the sounds of creaking wood and trilling birds, heard as a constant, enveloping hum at the titular abode, merge into a melancholy chorus for the downtrodden.
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