Director: Cao Guimaraes | Brazil 2012 | 71 min

A nut in the palm of a hand seems to contain a little bit of the mystery of life in Brazilian filmmaker Cao Guimaraes's up-close and gracious pictorial poem to his girlfriend, whom he met when she was the only spectator of his film 'Drifter' in an obscure arthouse cinema. This, we are told; the rest of the film is mostly conveyed in an impressionistic stream of images, whose symbolic and real layers are imperceptibly woven in and out of each other. First they were two, now they are three. Cao, Flor and now Otto, who spends most of the film inside his mother's growing belly while she is waiting for him to arrive. One can almost smell the damp earth under the leaves, as the cool autumn images surround her and succeed one another in unexpected constellations that are poetic in an almost elementary sense. Cao Guimaraes has created his dark, romantic and entirely self-produced film as a modest philosopher who expresses himself in pictures instead of words - and without placing a full stop anywhere in his stream of thoughts. A film with influences from Terence Malick and Stan Brakhage to Sergei Paradjanov, but with a confidence and elegance as unique as the handwriting of a poet.
Otto (Brazil, 2012, 71 min.)
Director: Cao Guimaraes.
with English Subtitles.
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