Elena

Forget the documents about animals or World War II. Brazilian documentary destroys the stereotypes of how a documentary film should look like. Instead of an objective voice which attempts a balanced description of facts, Elena tells an intimate story about herself. A young director Petra Costa turns her back to the outside world and undergoes a tortuous journey into her soul, her own history, and agonizing doubts. Elena is a documentary confession of a young director, who follows the footsteps of her own sister that decided to leave the totalitarian Brazil for New York to become a movie actress. Through authentic feelings of abandonment and fragile family ties, we follow a rocky path of adolescence, and seemingly incidentally we are discovering the atmosphere of these turbulent times. (Kino Brasil)