The Latin American Network Initiative (LANI), the Feminist collective (Femcol), and FILMAR invite you to the Movie screening of Manas followed by a panel discussion.
Manas (2024) (“Sisters” in Portuguese) is a Brazilian coming-of-age drama that tells the story of thirteen-year-old Marcielle, who lives with her parents and siblings in an isolated riverside community on Marajó Island, in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. As Tielle (as the protagonist is called) grows, she finds herself trapped in an intergenerational cycle of violence and silence, caught between the abuse of her own family home and that of the outside world.
After a decade-long research into sexual abuse in the Marajó region, documentary director Marianna Brennand decided that filming a documentary would be impossible: "I would never be able to put these women and children who had suffered such profound traumas in front of the camera. To ask them to recount the abuses would be to expose them to another violence" (Brennand, 2024). Manas is therefore a fictional story built from years of real victim testimonies and interviews with human rights defenders. The film premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, where it received the Director’s Award in the Giornate degli Autori section, and was selected as one of Brazil's candidates for the 2025’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.
As part of FILMAR 2026, this movie screening seeks to explore a cinematic approach where violence does not need to be explicitly shown to serve as a space of denunciation. This perspective mirrors the nature of invisible gender-based violence, which is systematically unseen, normalized within communities, and overlooked by institutions.
The panel discussion aims not only to look into the current situation and the consequences of gender-based violence, but also to address the underlying conditions that sustain the structural oppressions and patriarchal systems that make the situations in the movie possible. These issues are made even more precarious by the geographical isolation of the Marajó region and operate across Latin America.
