Estamira

Estamira is a poet and she lives intermittently in a garbage dump. This film is very long and very worth its length. And while there are filmmakers and editors behind it, Estamira is the writer and principal actor in this documentary. It is one of the many shames in the random sport of distribution that this film was not widely seen in the United States or elsewhere. For those who saw Bus 174, this should have seemed a worthy cousin, for its similar approach to a story of Brazil's underclass.

There are few playwrights or screenwriters or novelists that could match her use and facility with language. Yes, she is crazy and yes Dante would be jealous and Pope's should be nervous.

In the beginning of the movie we already get impressed with the beautiful photography. The camera catches some scenes not so common on our daily routine, we start to enter Estamira's world.

First, her madness: She says some concepts that seem out of reality and belonging to someone unreasonable person who's lost in life; maybe the long time she had spent on that amount of waste turned her into someone badly ill.

Throughout the movie, her words get in contrast with impressive sceneries. Nature and the human waste create an impression of dystopia and induce deep reflections about humanity and all we have done to ourselves.

Although in a poor and dirty place with inhuman conditions, we can see compassion and fraternity. Her words, although sometimes senseless, start to make some sense (if we take her living context as a start).

She is in fact ill; she is psycho. Her hallucinations go on through mystics and hate about catholicism. Se is sure that she is blessed with superior powers. She has hard pains, "it's the remote control" she says.

The documentary, then, focus on her personal history, her daughter, her son (a religion seeker), her "lost" daughter, the abandon of her husband, the rapes she suffered, her frustration with her believes. Her psychopathy starts to seem reasonable and to touch us deeply. In her mind, ideas and memories get mixed and form new concepts.

Despite her living conditions, she is happy and satisfied. Maybe it's an illusion, but her life is colored. And the camera shows that: when she talks about herself, the black and white becomes vivid and plain.

And we start to think: she is in a so sad and depressing reality (comparing to ours), but what she says about life, future, politics, religion, believes and perspectives... though based on an ill mind, makes a lot of sense to us. It's even revealing. Maybe the world is crazy. We are in a chaos. And Estamira, who is out of the economic system, can broadcast it.

Or not. Maybe we are so deeply lost in our normality and empty standard way of living, that we believe in anyone who says that can save us.

In the periphery of Rio de Janeiro, the sixty and something years old Estamira is an insane but happy woman that has been working for more than twenty years in the city dumpster in Gramacho, collecting remains for recycling or personal use. Along the documentary, we see the madness of this woman through her philosophic principles and concepts of life and religion; but further than that, we see that she was a normal married woman abused by her husband and with three daughters and one son, all of them well-raised and normal. In accordance with her older daughter, she told that she was a religious woman that worked in a supermarket; after being raped for the second time in Campo Grande, she became delusional and insane, giving up and blaming God.

"Estamira" is an awarded and overrated documentary about the sad and depressive life of this crazy, but happy and proud dump collector. The introduction of this documentary has one of the most impressive cinematography in grainy black and white I have recently seen, following Estamira from her home to her working place in the landfill. The runtime of 121 minutes is excessively long and boring, disclosing too much insanity for my taste. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Estamira"

Estamira, who suffered from diabetes, died at the age of 70 from a generalized infection, while waiting for two days in the corridors of the Miguel Couto Municipal Hospital, sadly accompanied by one of her three children and the director of this documentary who supported her during her hospitalization... The 2022 champion Samba School Grande Rio (for the first time) paid tribute to Estamira on one of its floats...

A poet and philosopher in moments of lucidity and an artist in the reveries of madness...

Estamira tells the story of a 63-year-old woman who suffers from mental disorders and has worked for more than twenty years at the Jardim Gramacho landfill, a place neglected by society, which receives more than eight thousand tons of garbage produced in Rio de Janeiro every day. With an eloquent, philosophical and poetic speech, the central character of the documentary raises intimate questions of global interest, such as the fate of the garbage produced by the inhabitants of a metropolis and the subterfuges that the human mind finds to overcome an unbearable reality to live.

It's an obscure film, shot in 2004, only released in the movie theaters now.

It's the story of a 72-year-old schizophrenic woman who has been earning a living, in the last 20 years, in Rio's city dumpster. Like hundreds of others, she awaits the huge trucks with garbage and scavenges it in search of material to recycle, sell or keep to herself. She says that's the happiest she's ever been, because she had no luck in the world prior to that. She's seen giggling with her friends, flirting with another - most likely, just as unstable as she is -, and remarking about her role in the universe.

The cinematography - yes, the city dumpster - is amazing. The opening scene shows plastic blacks flying among vultures, and from then on, grainy shots of people, like ants, climbing the piles of garbage, the red sunset, telling a story of pollution, a black river of a putrid liquid with gas coming out of the bubbles, the dogs and the horse against the sunset, side-by-side with a burning garbage can.

The comedy relief of the movie, and also some of its most insightful moments, comes with her cussing loudly at God. When one of her grandchildren mentions we all come from God, she says "shove God up your! God rapist God thief God that never helped me or anyone else! Your mother came from my bosom, nowhere else! God rapist, incompetent, mean!!" It's so outrageous, the whole audience was laughing out loud. Her only son, very religious, fears she is possessed with a malignant spirit, so he won't visit her anymore. The other daughter, not religious, gives her all support.

The story of her life is so sad that it can weakened by placing labels. They are always avoided in the movie, and her whole life is unveiled slowly, so that we are led to believe her when she says that the city dumpster was the best thing in her life. She is proud of what she does, proud that she built her house with what she found at the dumpster, and says that everybody in the world needs Estamira.

She had a daughter while living in the dumpster. Her older son decided to give the 6yo kid for an informal adoption with a loving, middle-class family. The girl is now 21, beautiful, and she says: "I feel resentment because I was not raised by my mother. I have bad memories of the dumpster, everything is bad there, but my mother raised my two siblings, why not me? We would be hungry sometimes, but I would survive, I know I would, and we'd never be separated".

The movie started small, but word of mouth is working so much that, on a Thursday, the theater was crowded, and people applauded at the end. Despite the punches in the stomach you get while watching it, it's in fact an uplifting movie, in that you see the love inside her family, the blissful ignorance of her friends at the dumpster, the fact that she laughs at herself and wants to go on living to fulfill her "mission".

Watch it if you have the chance and realize there is happiness where you least expect it.