I Built a Rocket Imagining Your Arrival

Rosa dives down into her childhood, to those disturbing moments when her mother was arrested, accused of killing her neighbour’s husband. Decades later, she sets out on a magical realist journey with the mother she never really had in order to finally rediscover some happy memories – through the landscapes of northern Brazil and those of her inner life. Together with her mother and sometimes without her, sometimes younger than her, sometimes appearing older, this road trip takes place in shimmering hills, the glowing light of the desert, a rickety hot dog van and the bright colours of the motel and bar scene; dealing with adapting and transforming roles, domestic violence, deep insecurities and how judgements are passed on following a path of Brazilian easygoingness, leading to queer tenderness and healing. With the courage to narrate mental realities in fragmentary, cyclical fashion, lots of suspense, soundscapes and film references and two great actors, Verônica Cavalcanti and Luciana Souza, Janaína Marques’s experimentally minded feature debut builds a rocket in which wounds and empowerment, mothers and daughters and female lives, and warmth all find their place.