The Whisper of the Jaguar is a queer-punk road movie, taking place across the Amazon and investigating indigenous knowledge and the experience of trance states through medicinal plants. By accessing the memories and traumas of her ancestors, the protagonist, Ana, who is carrying the ashes of her kuir (queer) activist brother, is confronted with her own imaginary perceptions of indigeneity, ego, and death in the contemporary political landscape of Brazil.
Between poetic images and performances, the movie deals with issues of youth, hybridity, postcolonial subjects, kuir sexualities, environmental destruction, medicinal plants, jaguars, and loss.
This presentation is the world premiere. The screening is followed by a conversation with Thais Guisasola, Simon(è) Jaikiriuma Paetau, and Margarita Tsomou.
Director of Photography: Giovanna Pezzo
Art Director/Costume Designer: Alicia Arteaga
Sound Designer/Mixing: Ruben Valdés
Editor: Ilka Miriam Valdés
Assistant Producer/Direct Sound: Daniel Martins
Music by Aérea Negrot, Peaches, Mad Kate I The Tide, Royal Dust, Mercenárias and The Clitor$
Simon(è) Jaikiriuma Paetau’s artistic projects are located between film and performance and deal with post-migrant subjects and kuir (queer) cultures. Paetau’s works have been featured at Museum of Modern Art, New York, Festival de Cannes, neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Studio Я of Maxim Gorki Theatre, and Ballhaus Naunynstrasse in Berlin, among others.
Thais Guisasola is a Brazilian filmmaker, performer, and award-winning screenwriter working on feature films and philosophical television series. Her work focuses on kuir (queer) experiences, de-colonialized voices, and ancestrality. She co-creates in a feminist political realm, is a practitioner of Candomblé, and a film director at Drama Filmes in São Paulo, Brazil.
Margarita Tsomou is a Greek author, publisher, dramaturge, and curator. She is the publisher of the pop-feminist Missy Magazine and writes for German newspapers and radio. Her artistic collaborations and curatorial projects have been presented at theaters such as the Hebbel am Ufer, Maxim Gorki Theater, and at the Volksbühne in Berlin; Kampnagel, Hamburg; and the Onassis Cultural Center, Athens. She is currently finishing a book on the “Representation of the Many,” in the context of the Greek Indignados Movement and the occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens in 2011. She is part of the publishing collective b_books in Berlin and the activist/artistic group Schwabinggrad Ballett in Hamburg. Tsomou lives and works in Berlin and on the Greek island of Skiathos.