What Can Escape Do?
Diego Silva Souza e Mariana de Melo

fuga
fu•ga
Exit, withdrawal, or a swift and disorderly departure from a place, generally in order to escape pursuit or a threat; flight, evasion, escape.

Over time, the act of fleeing has been consistently associated with cowardice and omission. There are, however, other ways of understanding it, recognizing in it gestures of invention. The philosopher Denetém Touam Bona is one of the thinkers who have sought to give shape to this concept through the techniques developed by enslaved people in colonial slaveholding contexts. In this sense, fleeing involves creating one’s own paths, possibilities of existence, and spaces of autonomy.

Touam Bona’s thought orbits this parallel exhibition, but it is not limited to thinking about Black filmmaking. To curate a film festival is to constantly observe filmmakers from Brazil and around the world finding their own routes of escape to give shape to their work. Escape runs through the gesture of filming, the relationship with one’s own image, the way of occupying a scene, and the possibilities of inhabiting the world.

This exhibition takes flight as its point of departure and finds in short filmmaking different ways of putting it into practice. The selection turns toward what evasion reveals about the short film itself: the creation of openings, the displacement of perspectives, the refusal of pre-established images, and the invention of other ways of being on screen. The concept thus emerges as a symptom of a cinema that works with brevity, experimentation, and the possibility of constructing, in just a few minutes, other paths for the gaze.

In Don’t wake the sleeping child (Ne réveillez pas l’enfant qui dort, 2025), escape takes shape in the body of a girl overcome by an irresistible sleep, on the eve of being confined to a future imposed upon her. Sleep interrupts the expected course of events and opens a breach within a circumstance that seems to offer no way out.

Recife has a heart (Recife tem um coração, 2026) elaborates an escape from the gaze of the other. The film reclaims its own image by looking at this man through what he believes in and the happiness he finds in what he does. His presence is constructed as a form of autonomy in the face of the images that could be projected onto him.

Mare (Yegua, 2026) explores the relationship between humans and animals through the escape embodied in the bond between a man and his mare. The man’s decline—her drunken owner, lost in a foggy night—becomes, for the mare, a possibility of freedom.

Finally, in Reverse Shot (Contracampo, 2026), escape takes on different forms and tensions. Above all, though not exclusively, in Beth, a grieving mother who unsettles the stereotype that the two filmmakers seem to expect of her, as they orchestrate the situation without concealing their desire to leave as soon as possible. She, however, finds other possibilities for being in that scene.

These are different ways of escaping images, expectations, and predetermined positions. Each film finds its own route of escape. Each escape produces a particular form of freedom.