Your heart's failing, so you make a movie about it. Icon behavior.
At 84 years of age, Lúcia Rocha admitted herself to a hospital in São Paulo to undergo heart tests. Upon receiving the news about the risk to her life, Lúcia, laconic, tells the doctor: 'Then open it'. This is the second time she has undergone bypass surgery. From this gesture, the documentary Abry was born (with y, sign of the unconscious, according to the nomenclature invented by his son, Glauber Rocha). To relate her memories, she invites filmmaker Joel Pizzini, who offers his mini camera as an instrument to amplify Lúcia's imagination. Abry is a poetic dive into Lúcia Rocha's fabulous universe, reconstructing her trajectory in Brazilian cinema through sounds, images and characters with whom she lived closely.
Cinematography
Mini-camera as portal to Lúcia's luminous imagination.
Sound
Ava and Jards Macalé voice a sonic landscape of memory.
Director
Joel Pizzini
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Lúcia Rocha was central to Brazil's Cinema Novo movement as Glauber Rocha's mother and collaborator, making this a rare maternal counter-narrative to the male auteur myth.
The title's invented spelling 'Abry' deliberately invokes Lacanian psychoanalysis—the 'y' as signifier of what resists symbolization, filmed literally in the unconscious space of pre-surgical delirium.
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