Here We Are, Waiting For You

According to director Marcelo Masagão, his film is a "documentary memory" of the 20th century. It consists largely of archive footage: excerpts from classic films, news reports and photographs, complemented by photos and footage that Masagão made especially for the film. Great themes that have shaped the 20th century come up: wars, industrial development and modern art. The film consists of short chapters that center around the lives of all kinds of people, both great and unknown. The general framework of the film is formed by images of a cemetery somewhere in Brazil. We see photos of tombstones with portraits of the deceased, to which the filmmaker adds fictitious names and years of birth and death. Masagão builds his scenes around these images, linking the lives of all these individuals to the history of the century they lived in. These stories are not presented as a chronological enumeration of facts. Instead, the film has the capricious structure of a dream or a memory, with unexpected leaps in time, associative editing, and suggestive music by Wim Mertens. There is no voice-over, but words nevertheless play an important role through text that appears in various places in the frame.