A fiction that imagines anxiety as literal explosions of light, surging out of one’s body. Tonight’s anxiety, this girl’s, is linked to her interrupted pregnancy.
On a hot night in an anonymous town, a woman wakes up. The sound of a rubbish lorry can be heard. There’s also a neighbour who records TikTok dances in the middle of the night and another neighbour who decides to move an armchair late at night. These are all elements of the sound ‘ecology’ of large metropolitan areas and poorly constructed buildings. And all this would be banal if the protagonist wasn’t having a medical abortion that night. Lucila Mariani films this event – which involves a certain amount of anxiety – between banality and surrealism. The power of everyday life and the ‘indifference’ of the world imposes itself on the procedure, and yet reality seems to infuse things with a dreamlike strangeness: a bottle of water glowing in the kitchen counter, a dog licking the trickle of blood running down a leg, a slug crawling unperturbed across the tiles in the living room. The ordinary becomes extraordinary and the atypical customary. Here is a fable about the enigmas of everyday life. (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa)
