MEMORY HOUSE, An Audacious Debut Feature, Opens September 3 At BAM

From September 3 through September 9, BAM presents the exclusive New York run of João Paulo Miranda Maria's Memory House in collaboration with Film Movement.

In this audacious debut feature, Maria conjures a surreal image of the racial and social rifts in modern day Brazil. Cristovam (played by Cinema Novo icon Antônio Pitanga), an Indigenous Black man from the rural North, moves to an industrialized Southern town populated by the descendants of Austrian ex-pats to work in a milk factory. Immediately confronted with their virulent racism, he becomes more and more estranged from the white world. Upon discovering an abandoned house filled with objects reminding him of his origins, Cristovam begins a spiritual and physical metamorphosis.

With dreamlike images steeped in traditional Brazilian folklore from Oscar-winning cinematographer Benjamin Echazarreta (A Fantastic Woman), Memory House is a "a study of what happens to an oppressed minority as decades of abuse chip away at his humanity" (Variety).

One of the most original works in recent cinema. Memory House... is the definition of vigor in cinema. Through its direction and technical aspects, it establishes João Paulo Miranda Maria as one of the most exciting directors in recent years."-João Victor Montuori, High On Films

"João Paulo Miranda Maria's first full-length film melds past and present, realism and fantasy, to offer a mesmerising symbolic and political immersion into the Brazilian collective subconscious."-Fabien Lemercier, Cineuropa