Unliveable

Brazil is one of the most dangerous places in the world to be transgender, and it’s getting worse. At least 175 trans women were murdered there in 2020, an increase of 43% on the previous year – and that’s just the cases which are known about. President Bolsonaro’s aggressive rhetoric has increased hostility in an already volatile social climate, so when her daughter Roberta goes missing, Marilene (Luciana Souza) fears the worst.

We follow her as she visits Roberta’s friends and they, in turn, make calls, hoping to trace her movements, Marilene’s neighbour urges her to go to the police but she knows that will be useless. As friends held her search through Roberta’s things she finds a strange object which intermittently glows and heats up, seeming to acquire a static charge. Carrying it around with her, meaning to show it to an electrician, she begins to take comfort in it, as if it still connects her to her daughter, even though the days are ticking by and, without saying it, everybody knows that there’s less and less chance of finding her alive.

High up in the sky above the crowded hills, a strange light shines in the skies. It seems to be growing larger. Is it connected to the mysterious object? To Roberta? Writer/director team Enock Carvalho and Matheus Farias invite us to wonder. In so doing, we move into the uncertain space that exists when a loved one is missing and nothing is as it should be, a space where anything seems possible, with all the terror and hope that that brings. We are no longer sure what is real and, emotionally, the notion of some divine or alien presence seems no less probable than that this loving mother might be forever separated from her child.

There is something else here, and that’s the oblique suggestion that Roberta herself might have chosen to throw in her lot with something otherworldly rather than continue trying to survive in a hostile land. If so, will she come back for the others? Unliveable has more questions that answers but it’s beautifully performed and captures something of the psychological experiences of trying, under such strained circumstances, to be human.

Unliveable screened as part of the Scottish Queer International; Film Festival 2021.