Brazil / 2013 / 76mins / Documentary / Portuguese

Seven adolescents take on the mission of filming, for one week, their family's housemaids, and hand over the footage to the director to make a film. The images that confront us uncover the complex relationship that exists between housemaids and their employers, a relationship that confuses intimacy and power in the workplace and provides us with an insight into the echoes of a colonial past that linger in contemporary Brazil.

Gabriel Mascaro

Gabriel Mascaro, born in 1983, lives and works in Recife, Brazil. He graduated in Social Communication from the Federal University of Pernambuco. His work explores the negotiation of power relationships in their most diverse forms. Spanning cinema and the visual arts, his work has been shown at the Contemporary Art Museums of Barcelona, MOMA Documentary Fortnight – New York, La Casa Escendida – Madrid, AB4 Athens Biennale, 32nd Panorama of Brazilian Art at MAM-SP, Videobrasil and at important film festivals, such as Rotterdam, Oberhausen, Visions du Rèel, IDFA, Munich, Jihlava, Bafici, Los Angeles, Miami, IndieLisbon, Bratislava, Bangkok. His work has been reviewed in various magazines, including Variety (USA), Cahiers du Cinéma (FRA). Mascaro participated in the Videobrasil/Videoformes Artist in Residence Program (FRA) and has been awarded at Videobrasil with another residency at Wexner Center for Art -Ohio (USA). In 2015 Mascaro released his second narrative feature, Neon Bull (Boi Neon) co-produced with Uruguayan and Dutch production companies. Neon Bull premiered at the Venice Festival's Mostra Orizzonti and went on to show at the Toronto International Film Festival. Its Brazilian debut was at the Rio Film Festival, where it won four prizes. At the Marrakech Festival, Mascaro received the best director award from the hands of director Francis Ford Coppola, one of the jurors at the event. In April 2016, the curator Dennis Lim organized a retrospective at Film at Lincoln Center in New York entitled Ebbs and Flows, featuring all of Mascaro's feature-length work since High-rise. In 2019, Mascaro's fiction film Divino Amor (Divine Love) premiered at the Sundance and Berlinale Festivals, with The Hollywood Reporter and Screen International both picking it as one of the best films of the crop that year.
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