Tagline:

Trapped in her mother’s mourning, Ana Marta draws inspiration from a strange agricultural program and turns waste into an act of rebellion. 

Synopsis

Ana Marta lives imprisoned in her mother’s grief, forced to embody the deceased brother she never knew. Dressed in his clothes and made to repeat his gestures, she loses her name, her gender, and her autonomy, becoming the stage of a symbolic violence that shapes her childhood. Her mother, Maria do Carmo, struggles to contain her own pain while unconsciously repeating the oppressive patterns inherited from her mother, Maria das Dores, the grandmother whose life was marked by repression, loss, and survival through control.

Amid this suffocating household, Ana Marta discovers a strange agricultural program hosted by the eccentric Horácio Bom Senhor, a trickster figure who introduces chaos as possibility.

Inspired, she begins a secret ritual in the backyard: she defecates daily into the soil, using her waste as a fertilizer in a grotesque yet intimate act of resistance. Accompanied by a mysterious, ethereal pianist who punctuates moments of absurdity and transformation, Ana Marta turns mourning into matter, grief into compost, and the backyard into a site of regeneration.

Through this bodily and absurd ritual, the cycle of grief begins to shift: the household’s rigidity meets the strange, the absurd, and the tender, and life emerges from what was lost. In this garden of revolt and renewal, Ana Marta plants the seeds of regeneration, suggesting that even in the midst of inherited trauma, the body, the earth, and imagination can be transformed into fertile, rebellious hope. 

Project representatives:

Ana Rita da Cunha Barbosa 

Marta Nascimento Lima