Rio de Mulheres

The idea of making the film "River of Women" came from a casual observation. The filmmakers, by traveling around the Jequitinhonha Valley, in Brazil, saw several women washing clothes along the Araçuaí river. They were there, hypnotized by their hard work and routine. The clothes that they washed and wore were so colorful and it all contrasted with the dry vegetation of this arid place. They were twenty, thirty, forty women in the riverbed. They spent all day there, without haste. Their movements, the sound of beating clothes on rocks, the murmur of conversation in small groups, the river passing between them, everything in the scene has caused a great fascination and a great desire to find out who were these women.
This motivation became the film "River of Women," a 21-minute documentary about the routine of women living in rural communities of quilombos remnants located in an arid region of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Their husbands, children and grandchildren aged over 16 years old spend most of the year working in the sugarcane fields in São Paulo state. These men are forced to leave and seek support for their families elsewhere because at home the weather does not provide possibility to survive in agriculture or in anything else.
The women are left behind, watching the house, children, adolescents and elderly of the family in a condition of extreme drought and lack of water. The documentary offers a little visually from the everyday life of these women and seeks to show the grace and poetry of their day-after-day: the routine of the house, the relationship that the children have with the place, the cook in the oven and stove wood for, the arrival of the truck bringing water, the washing of clothes in the river and the moments of entertainment at parties filled with other women, at home, praying, etc…
Above all, this is a film about the survival of a decent way of life and also about the waiting for the re-encounter with their men.