Arquivo

This is a documentary in the first person. Six years after she left Brazil, Claudia Neubern, now in Paris, receives an ancient K-7 tape of her parents‚Äô wedding. She was then 26, but it was the first time she had heard the voice of her mother who died when Claudia was one year old. “My feelings were such at the sound of her voice that I burst into tears. My mother’ voice resounded somewhere hitherto unknown in my being”, says the young director. “I decided to go to Brazil in search of her story, in search of my own story...” Claudia interviewed relatives, friends and any person who might have known her mother. “Suddenly, the image of a correct, polite ‚Äòprincess‚Äô they had conveyed to me, seemed totally unfitting”, she says. Claudia returned to France with one certainty: memory is fickle. “Memory invents, deforms and rewrites the past. In vain did I endeavor to build a definite image. Out of all they told me about, all that was left was the outline of her smile, her love for life, and her courage in assuming what she wished for. Her freedom was the greatest heritage I received”.