Housemaids

For this provocative social experiment, Mascaro armed seven teenagers with movie cameras in order to film their live-in maids for a week. From the footage they shot, he assembled this eye-opening portrait of deep-seated class divisions within the Brazilian home. As the housekeepers carry out their daily work, they reveal intimate, sometimes painful details about their personal lives and their complex relationships to the families they work for. The results are alternately humorous and heartbreaking, cutting to the core of entrenched social hierarchies inextricably bound to race, gender, and Brazil’s colonialist history. An Icarus Films release.

Screening with:

Ebb and Flow / A Onda Traz, O Vento Leva
Gabriel Mascaro, Brazil/Spain, 2014, 29m
Portuguese with English subtitles
Rodrigo, a young deaf man with HIV, lives in Recife with his mother and 4-year-old daughter and has a job installing car stereos in the outskirts of the city. His daily motions draw us into a journey made up of ordinary experiences, yet they also reveal subtle layers of his character as Mascaro captures his expressive body in movement—while he signs to a friend, deftly fixes a stereo system, or dances to the vibrations of surrounding music.