The short film from Mato Grosso do Sul “As Marias” received the award for best film from Panorama Latino Americano at the Curta Cinema festival, in Rio de Janeiro.
The production premiered at the Rio Festival, and has already collected other awards, such as best short at the Gostoso Cinema Show (RN), at Cine Congo (PB) and best human interest film at the Toronto Documentary Film Festival. In total, there are already 11 festivals.
The production tells about triplets Maria Etelvina, Maria Leonor and Maria Salvadora, who were born in 1947 and made the news. At the time, in what was then Mato Grosso, in Guia Lopes da Laguna, a city that saw the Paraguayan War up close, it was unusual for a woman to give birth to three daughters, all of them healthy. They say, with pride, that even the governor came to visit them.
During the production process, Dannon asked five great women to submit questions to their aunts. The list includes actresses Vera Holtz, Renata Sorrah, director Andréa Freire, Yuda Santiago and Carla Faour, screenwriter for the series Segunda Chamada, on Rede Globo.
“I used these questions and mine to make this documentary. And when we went to edit the documentary, Nina Galanternick, who I chose to be the editor, proposed some things that I didn’t want at first, but that I ended up understanding were necessary. And then the film gained the form it presents today. Although, of course, much of the structure was planned beforehand, which was to talk about this woman from Mato Grosso do Sul from the last century,” she explains.
Dannon Lacerda, director of the short film
Etelvina, Santinha and Duna, as they are known in the city, come from traditional families, being great-great-granddaughters of José Francisco Lopes – Guia Lopes, immortalized in the work Retirada da Laguna de Visconde de Taunay – and Senhorinha Barbosa Lopes, as well as Dannon .
The film was recorded in Guia Lopes da Laguna, a city 216 km from Campo Grande. It was recently shown at the audiovisual introduction workshops at the Bonito South American Film Festival, in November 2023.
