Investor Presentaiton
ALANA INSTITUTE
POETRY ON
THE BIG SCREEN
Territory of Play becomes a feature documentary with a premiere
planned for May of 2015. The editing process was a careful
and sensitive immersion in over 500 hours of filmed material
It took two years traveling throughout Brazil and visiting many
communities - rural, indigenous, descendants of escaped slaves, in
the badlands, the coast, and in cities. In each one, an eye dedicated
to children, to games, to the culture of childhood. A documenta-
tion in photos, texts, sound, and many, many hours of filming.
Renata Meirelles and David Reeks spent a good part of
2014 deep in the 500 hours of material they brought in their With time slipping through their fingers
luggage. She's an educator, and he's a documentary filmmaker.
Both had the challenge of creating a story, finding a narrative
thread and delivering a feature length film the work that will
take to cinema screens the richness of what was captured by the
couple during their journey.
present team of collaborators and Maria Farinha Filmes! – dove
headfirst into the images, revealing the subtleties of childhood
expressed through play. There, they saw what they had not seen
yet, rediscovered, revisited. Their monitor revealed such a rich
universe... A the film made itself.
=
But... where to start? Renata decided to study. She read film
theory, buried her head in film editing manuals, studied structure,
discovered tricks. Despite being rich, this process kept her away
from playing and its subtleties. She decided to jump over to po-
etry. She delved into a variety of poets, in the hope that from one
of them would come the inspiration for her film.
However, the answer was not in poetry. Suddenly Renata re-
alized that reading was not moving her forward. The production
only started moving once she started listening to her own intui-
tion and searched for a path to the film within herself. “I realized
that I could only make a film if I found the truth in the material,
what it had to say through my point of view," she explains.
With this new lens, Renata and David as well as the ever
As if this process wasn't intense enough, the daily demands of
the projects kept happening. An exhibition with part of the ma-
terial collected by Renata and David during their trip was set
up during the Ciranda of Films at the Conjunto Nacional, in
São Paulo. The same exhibition moved to the Sports and Physi-
cal Education School at the University of São Paulo (USP), to
Colégio Oswald de Andrade, to the International Festival of
Language Exchange (FIL) in Rio de Janeiro, and to the VII Pai-
déia Festival. The short documentaries produced by David and
Renata also received honorable mention at the International
Children's Film Festival in Florianópolis.
The material the two produced in São Paulo - the last stage
of their trip was released on the project's website. And Renata
still published a book, Cozinhando no Quintal (Cooking in the
Backyard, Editora Terceiro Nome), with photos that show the
culinary world of children's games, where flowers, grass, leaves
and seeds are transformed into the ingredients of great banquets.
The subtleties of play were
documented during Renata Meirelles
and David Reeks' trip through Brazil.
PHOTOS RENATA MEIRELLES
DO
TERRITÓRIO
BRINCAR
28 29
What is it: A project dedicated
to research, documentation, and
raising awareness of the culture
of childhood in Brazil, coordi-
nated by the educator Renata
Meirelles and the documentary
filmmaker David Reeks.
Highlight: Short films from the ex-
hibition received honorable men-
tion at the Children's Film Festival
in Florianópolis.
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