• homens
• deuses
• santos
• unigranrio
• eventos e manifestações

Men, Gods and Saints in the Village of Itaúnas" is an ethnodocumentary made in the north of the state of Espírito Santo, in the small village of Itaúnas. Its traditional population of artisanal fishermen has a strong Afro-descendant trait in their way of life. Its inhabitants tell about their roots linked to Ticumbi and Arte de Curar, its traditions, faith and devotion to São Benedito and São Sebastião. Direction and Research: Maria Aparecida de Sá Xavier Executive Production: Lab.Muy Arte e Cultura Digital Production Director: Carol Covre Camera: Carol Covre and Hugo Reis Direct sound: Hugo Reis Editing: Carol Covre Sound Editing and Mixing: Joceles Bicalho "In a critical position to the society of the spectacle, the documentary Men, Gods and Saints in the Village of Itaúnas by the geographer Maria de Sá Xavier is a rich support of material and symbolic elements. Space and time, objectivity and subjectivity, the personal and the collective. To know the world is to feel it: the smell, the sound and the taste. Maria brings to the body of the film what is essential to man: his nature, his culture. She makes the transit of the eye, the image, from the figurations of the society of the spectacle – which distance – to the empirical experience of (and with) man, which brings them closer. The image did not star in the documentary quite by the way. She also awakened flavors and sounds that accompanied her. Technical requirements for a report document that has an anthropological bias in good terms, become, say, unnecessary. The tone is, in fact, in defense of craftsmanship, to accompany the tone of the city of Itaúnas – a space that has little houses made by João de Barro on high voltage poles. Tension of modernity that threatens nature. Listening to the film, the images gained more strength and meaning. Listening to the reports of Tia Aninha, Seu Caboquinho, their songs, was an experience that, made after seeing, moved and brings us closer to the soul of the characters. In many measures, she put the eye to rest and approached Adélia Prado's sense of a map-text that the author chose as the epigraph of the film that tells and sings Itaúnas' Ticumbí. The view highlighted the closed planes on the feet, on the roads, on the trees, on the saints and handicrafts, and traced a documentary of details. She awakened the senses. The geographer in the cinema brought the smell of earth. “The map holds blood and treasures”, says Adélia Prado. The memory map, the photos, the dancing feet, the saints, the sacred and the profane, the eyes full of water, the subjective eyes of the camera directed by Maria de Sá Xavier invited us to enter and drew the map on the dirt road culture that each account brought with it." Review by Anna Paula Soares Lemos Prof. Adjunct to the Graduate Program in Humanities, Cultures and Arts – UNIGRANRIO