Fisheress, beware not to catch in your nets the sulfurous Seranha! The malefic Venenus, from her mouth injected, will inflame your sleeping ecstasy and transform you forever…
Loosely inspired by The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen, or rather, a delirium shaped as a queer fable with psychedelic drive and a vampiric tone. In Venenus, the Seranha rejects any logic of romantic redemption. There is no prince, nor any desire for assimilation into the human world. The body, instead, asserts itself as a site of transformation and contagion. The film begins in an apparently documentary register, suggesting a fishing community whose everyday reality is soon contaminated. Subtle sonic and visual dissonances begin to infiltrate, unsettling the apparent calm and signalling a drift into the fantastical. It is through the fisherwomen, embodied by the duo Venga Venga, that the narrative fully shifts into the realm of metamorphosis, triggered by the capture of the Seranha, portrayed by Tita Maravilha. In just over six minutes, Marie Fages achieves the remarkable feat of constructing a mythology of her own, where eroticism, the grotesque, and playfulness intertwine as forces of emancipation. Soundtrack by Menino da Mãe. (Susana Santos Rodrigues)
