Photography plays a central role in Claudia Varejao’s moving short, Kora.
Split into five chapters, the film presents the stories of five different women – a diverse group with regards to their original home countries, their backgrounds, their situations. They are united, however, by their current lives in contemporary Portugal, and by the ways in which photographs analogue and digital offer them a connective line back to the life and world they have, sadly, been forced to leave behind. Receiving its world premiere as part of the Giornate degli autori in Venice, this is a film very much of the present, and about the ways people become rent from and tied to their past.
In the supporting blurb for the film on the Terratreme website, Kora is described as accessing the “gaze of those who reconstruct (their) present.” It is perhaps an innocuous phrase on some publicity material, but it gets to the heart of one of things that Varejao’s film quietly, but somewhat radically, does. It repositions the plight of the refugee by allowing us to see that the painful lack of agency that led to them fleeing their homes can be transformed, in asylum, into self-determination. Whether these women were escaping the patriarchal oppression of the Taliban or the anti-queer rhetoric of Vladimir Putin’s government, their new lives have been self-created.
In part, that also applies to their relationships to their own pasts. Each of these women has images that represent what they have left behind – from a mug with a family photo, to a snapshot of a son, to a passport photo of themselves before gender reassignment. They tell their stories in voiceover, accompanied by monochrome images that revolve around these photos more than moving portraiture, before their chapter concludes in a colour, in a photo booth in Portugal. Photos provide them with a line to before and an object of the now. Kora allows each woman control over their own narrative.
Director, cinematography, editing: Claudia Varejao
Cast: Inna Klochko, Lana Alkouse, Margarita Sharapova, Norina Sohail, Zohra Ghadr Alzaman
Producers: Joao Matos, Leonor Noivo, Luisa Homem, Susana Nobre, Pedro Pinho, Tiago Hespanha
Sound: Adriana Bolito
Music: Joana Gama
Production company: Terratreme Filmes (Portugal)
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Giornate degli autori)
In Arabic, Ukranian, Russian
28 minutes
