Narrating yourself in relation: building intimacy and memory of Brazilian documentarists
documentary; written by you; self-registration; memory.
Subjective documentary, first-person documentary, personal documentary -designations that are part of the same contemporary trend, which is accentuated in the 21st century: the centrality of the self. The films Os dias com ele (Maria Clara Escobar, 2012), Person (Marina Person, 2007) and Diário de uma Busca (Flávia Castro, 2010) are some examples in the Brazilian documentary of narratives in which the author adopts confessional practices and expresses herself in the first person. These are films in which, through the reconstruction of a lost memory of absent parents, the filmmakers narrate their own stories – to narrate oneself in dialogue with becoming. The objective of this research is to investigate how the studied filmmakers use documentary language to write and present their stories. Analyzing the films, we identified three main schemes: the filmmakers' self-inscription (body and voice), the use of archives (images and documents) and the construction of a narrative of themselves in relation (with the familiar other). The organizational element of the discourse in these films is the search, this affective force that leads the filmmakers to build a narrative about their parents, about themselves and about the journey in which they are inserted.