Elena

At the beginning of the 90s, Elena, a young girl from Brazil, would travel to New York to fulfill the same dream her mother had when she was her age: to become a movie actress. Leaving her childhood behind, forever tainted by the military dictatorship, she also “abandoned” her 7-year-old sister, Petra. Two decades later, Petra arrives in the same American metropolis looking for the traces of her long lost sister. Using old family videos, newspaper clippings, a diary, her personal correspondence and the fragmented memories of those who knew her, director Petra Costa tries to untangle her memories, in order to find out who her sister really was. When Petra finally encounters Elena where she least expected, she now has to learn how to let go… Painful and at the same time cathartic, Petra Costa’s directorial debut is like an open wound. The more she follows the footsteps of her tragic, fragile sister, the more their lives become entangled and their personalities entwined to the point it’s hard to tell who’s who. Will the filmmaker ever really be able to do away with the ghosts of the past? The answer is a poetic, almost dream-like film, where reality and memory merge in a melancholy landscape of sound and vision, one of the most beautiful specimens of non-fiction to come out of Brazil in the last few years.