Filme particular

To revive her old projector, Janaína Nagata buys a 16mm reel. The product comes with a bonus, a 19-minute tape that shows a family vacation in South Africa during the 1960s. After showing us the entire movie, Nagata rewinds and begins a meticulous dissection job on the image, pausing, cutting, blowing up. What is there behind those smiling faces, behind this happy family? Nagata uses every online tool she can get her hands on in order to continue with the image’s autopsy, and this way, she turns Private Footage into an exciting desktop thriller. Completely exposed in its production conditions, the research forges its way among advertisement and paywalls to reveal, through that idyllic family souvenir, the traces of decades of racist violence. The old motto of “the personal is political” achieves, in Private Footage achieves some heartrending power.