The House of Sand
Starring: Fernanda Montenegro, Fernanda Torres, Seu Jorge
Director: Andrucha Waddington
The film: Almost four years in the making, The House of Sand could have been the 21st-century take on Werner Herzog's rainforest-transgressing Fitzcarraldo - but less brutal and more poetic and visually ravishing. Andrucha Waddington's magnum opus about a woman's 60-year-battle to carve an existence amidst the vast dunes in remote northern Brazil is more a celebration of a determined matriarch than the follies of an adventurer.
The story unfolds in 1910, as young urbanite Aurea (Fernanda Torres, below) - her mother Maria (Fernanda Montenegro, Torres' real-life mother) in tow - braves the sun, sand and scorching heat to follow her tyrannical husband Vasco (Ruy Guerra) on a misguided mission to set up a farm in the almost lunar geographical void in northern Maranhao.
The abrupt departure of their party of frustrated labourers - cowed by the uninhabitable terrain and machete-wielding, newly freed slaves settling near by - and Vasco's premature demise set in motion Aurea's fight against Lencoi Maranhenses' shifting sands.