Making visible the invisible, Ethics and Politics around Manas

Movie screening & Panel discussion

FILMAR en América Latina, the Latin American Network Initiative (LANI), and the Feminist collective (Femcol) invite you to the Movie screening of Manas followed by a panel discussion.

As part of FILMAR 2026, Switzerland’s largest Latin American film festival, which will take place from November 13 to 22, this movie screening seeks to explore a cinematic approach where violence does not need to be explicitly shown to serve as a space of denunciation. This perspective mirrors the nature of invisible gender-based violence, which is systematically unseen, normalized within communities, and overlooked by institutions. 

Manas (2024) (“Sisters” in Portuguese) is a Brazilian coming-of-age drama that tells the story of thirteen-year-old Marcielle, who lives with her parents and siblings in an isolated riverside community on Marajó Island, in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. As Tielle (as the protagonist is called) grows, she finds herself trapped in an intergenerational cycle of violence and silence, caught between the abuse of her own family home and that of the outside world. 

After a decade-long research into sexual abuse in the Marajó region, documentary director Marianna Brennand decided that filming a documentary would be impossible: "I would never be able to put these women and children who had suffered such profound traumas in front of the camera. To ask them to recount the abuses would be to expose them to another violence" (Brennand, 2024). Manas is therefore a fictional story built from years of real victim testimonies and interviews with human rights defenders. The film premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, where it received the Director’s Award in the Giornate degli Autori section, and was selected as one of Brazil's candidates for the 2025’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. 

The panel discussion aims to look into the underlying conditions that sustain the existing structural oppressions and patriarchal systems into the isolated Marajó region and across Latin America and also aims to address social movements and existing forms of action.

These issues related to gender-based violence are an integral part of FILMAR's 28th edition program, the rest of which will be unveiled on Thursday, October 29. 

Panelists

• Simon Lobach: IHEID, environmental historian and professor of geopolitics specialized in Latin America
• Dr. Nathalia Capellini: UNIL, environmental historian specialized in Latin America

• Clarissa Périssé: IHEID, student speaker, LANI board member

  Moderator:  
  Graziella Moraes Dias Da Silva (IHEID, co-direct of the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy and professor of anthropology and sociology).