DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

Sometimes we don't know the consequences of the stories told by our parents. A good part of my childhood was illuminated by fragments of what my father told about his life as a northeast migrant in São Paulo throughout the 1970s. And almost always the stories came as a cautionary tale, there was usually a lesson to be learned from the small joys and the great difficulties of his impoverished life in the richest city in Brazil.

It was only when I was an adult that I realized that the migrations of my paternal family, which involved about four voyages, back and forth, between Natal and São Paulo, were directly connected with the lives of thousands of migrants who incessantly attended this same journey at different times of the country's history. My father never wanted his suffering to be repeated by his children, but it's inevitable not to feel his past moving inside me.

Even though the northeast migrations as they were in the past have ceased - and there is a strong interest in contemporary brazilian cinema in the northeast as a place of rooting - I believe in the importance of revisiting the gaps and silences of history and I believe in the production of new images about the life of these migrants. In Brazil it is never too much to remember our collective pain.

With DEPARTURE I placed myself in an active state of repetition, remediation and re-creation of the images narrated by my father, and imagining many others with a distanced and safe view of history. Within the family, the home and the emptiness evoked by the film, are the contradictions and conflicts that this archive of images and lives resonate within me.

The short film DEPARTURE presents a fragment of a family history that is still present in many impoverished populations around the world. In a globalized territory like ours, where movement is permanent and inevitable, The feelings of doubt, fear, survival and hope stirred during the departure of many continue to cross endless generations.