MEIO

MEIO

Clarissa Beckert, Pedro Henrique Risse | Brazil 2013 | 20 Min. | OmeU

Meio deals with the imaginary of a multiheritaged community’s cultural identity: In Vila Rica, a rural area of the municipality Presidente Lucena, south Brazil, 83 year-old Lina lives and remembers. She can only speak and understand the German dialect Hunsrückisch. As a German descendant living in Brazil, she can hardly communicate with her grandchildren, who were raised speaking Brazilian Portuguese. In a near-by school children learn German, trying to imagine the homeland of their ancestors and questioning what this has to do with their lives in Brazil. The film develops a narrative on the basis of counterpoints underlining the distance that exists between the generations of German descendants in the Vale dos Sinos Valley in Rio Grande do Sul, south Brazil. What does it mean to be a Brazilian? What does it mean to be a German-Brazilian? Or a German? The film deals with the question of identity as something pending between memory and imaginary and sees the language as a means to communicate and to express this identity.