Same/Different/Both/Neither

A noisy anti-Bolsonaro protest in São Paulo; moving house in Los Angeles to the accompaniment of an ice cream truck’s merry whine; a Black Lives Matter demonstration; the digging out and reinforcement of a neighbor’s building foundations. These appear at first to be random scenes—some shot in grainy black and white, others in crisp color—but in fact all of them are video messages sent by two girlfriends to each other during lockdown in Brazil and the United States.

During their period of isolation at home they share a mix of everyday personal scenes and societal events. We hear fragments of inspiration and poetic reflections in voice over, and see others in the form of written, typed, or even scratched images. The simple act of taking a bath turns into an echoey experiment in sound and vision for Fernanda. Adriana, meanwhile, focuses on movement: the neighbor dancing, the caretaker pacing up and down, the helicopters circling overhead.

In this eclectic exchange of video letters, the small and the big, the home and the world stage, the banal and the poetic all come together in a wonderful transcendence of place and time.