O Peixe

Located on the Northeast coast of Brazil, a village of fishermen enact a ritual of embracing the fish that they have caught.

The affectionate hug that accompanies the ritual marks a passage of death and a relationship between species that is imbued with an ambiguous sequence of gestures of tenderness, violence, and domination. The utopian dream of a harmonious community with its surroundings is a testament to the lack of connection between a man from the city and the nature that is at his service.

Between fiction and reality, documentation and fantasy, the naturalness of domination hides the root of this relationship constituted by the constant exercise of strength, power and devotion. Borrowing from storytelling, folklore, ethnography and anthropology, Jonathas de Andrade explores issues surrounding the colonial legacies of Latin America, its current brutalities and what the artist calls its ‘urgencies and discomforts’.

This film has been made with a group of fishermen from Piaçabuçu and Coruripe, by the river São Francisco and the sea in Northeast of Brazil.

Growing up in Maceio, Alagoas, I was exposed to the complexities of Northeastern Brazilian culture: the sugar cane culture, the plantations, the elites, the poor, the class conflicts. All of these factors were conditions that I observed and felt during childhood, and that have greatly impacted me, along with all the nuances that come along with this power struggle.

- Jonathas de Andrade