Deborah Viegas

Writer / Director

Brazil & Portugal

Deborah Viegas (b.1993) is a Brazilian filmmaker and artist. Her films are marked by laconic narratives that delve into everyday life to investigate the role of institutions and collective spaces in founding and perpetuating a political notion of normality – pointing to subtle and accidental forms of resistance and subversion.
Her films have been screened and awarded at festivals around the world such as IFFR-International Film Festival Rotterdam, Festival Internacional de Cine de Cartagena de Indias and Festival do Rio.
Viegas also frequently collaborates with other artists as an editor. These works were screened in festivals such as Berlinale, Locarno, TIFF and others.
YOUNG WOMAN SEEN FROM BEHIND is her first feature film project.

Project

Young woman seen from behind

Rita has just started working in a museum of Portuguese history, located inside an 15th century Portuguese Palace. Her job is to watch one of the exhibition rooms. There she finds out she was hired to replace a former employee, a Brazilian boy named Antônio, who was fired for exhibiting “suspicious behavior” and who has since disappeared. One day, upon arriving early to open the museum, she accidentally drops one of the pieces, a sculpture called “Head of a boy”. Noticing a small crack in the sculpture, Rita decides to hide the incident. From then on Rita’s daily life is hunted by the fear of being caught. The fear leads her to search for Antônio in a quest to unravel the mystery of his disappearance. Inside the museum, amid remembering and forgetting, fear and mystery sew an elusive threat. A threat that invites us to reevaluate the heart of spaces, objects, and interactions. The memory of the colonial past seeps into the nostalgic fabrications of the present and the anxiety for the future