Dir. Maíra Bühler - 85min - 2019 - Brazil - Language: Portuguese - Subtitles available in: English, French, Spanish

Downtown São Paulo, Brazil. An Apartment Building: 7 floors, 28 rooms, 107 residents who all have in common the addiction to crack. Over the course of several months, life in a social housing project - part of a city hall “damage reduction” program about to be extinguished - is revealed. Characters on a hallucinated hunt for bonding, and fighting passionately for life, can be seen as the camera drifts through hallways, rooms, elevators, stairs; day and night. In this claustrophobic place, anything can happen.

"Most people who are not crack users look at this universe with a deep sense of estrangement. When the image of a crack user appears on TV or is printed on the pages of the “cities” section of newspapers, what emerges is a vertiginous sense of difference that definitively separates “them” from “us”. This distance is expressed in the construction of a sensationalist imagery that arouses fear, pity, tension, disgust and all sorts of violence. What is revealed to the “general public” are not people but “zombies”, characters who are often monstrous, stripped of reason, wild beings, often invested with animal aggression and with whom it is impossible to establish a dialogue.

This film is an experience in going the other way around: getting in touch with and being affected by the characters, understanding who they are, where they hurt and how they live their lives. It’s a film about the universal feeling of love." Maíra Bühler