Photo: Zeca Miranda
After an acclaimed world premiere at the Rio Film Festival, Brazilian director Eduardo Nunes’ second feature film UNICORN will have its international premiere in Berlinale Generation.
Based on two stories by renowned Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst, UNICORN takes up many of the author’s themes – sexuality, physicality, desire, death, and the pain they can inflict, or that people inflict upon each other – in a visual form that enhances the tension between a reality depicted with great faith to details and the magical realism that characterizes much of Hilst’s work.
Maria, a prepubescent teenage girl, lives in an isolated hovel together with her mother, tending their farm. Scenes from her life are interspersed with conversations with her absent father in a cold, tiled room, far removed from her everyday reality. The arrival of a rough man, almost savage and in equal measure menacing and attractive, at the farm throws her mother, and her relationship with Maria, into confusion.
In Maria's universe the appearance of a unicorn does not seem impossible, and many archetypal, fairy-tale tropes feel natural. None of these are easy symbols, they remain riddles, whose solutions are less important than their atmospheric properties.
World sales are handled by FiGa Films.
UNICORN (Unicórnio) by Eduardo Nunes
Brazil, 2017, 123 minutes
Cast: Patrícia Pillar, Barbara Luz, Zécharlos Machado, Lee Taylor
Produced by: 3 Tabela Filmes
World sales:
FiGa Films
+1 323 229 9816