Portrait of the Father at 71
A film that boldly ventures into realms of intimacy that cinema rarely addresses so directly. Its creator, Dr. Diego Semerene – a non-binary Brazilian filmmaker and scholar of queer media at the University of Amsterdam – made a film essay twenty years ago as a deeply personal conversation with his father about growing up, sexuality and the search for masculinity. Their father had never seen this until now, watching it for the first time as a 71-year-old man. The film returns to that material, confronting the past with the present through an extraordinarily honest dialogue between father and child. It is a story about a queer childhood in Brazil, about the emotional tension between the desire for acceptance and personal identity, and about how memory and family intertwine with our deepest l
