Temporada de caça

“What drove me to create Temporada de Caça (Hunting Season) was the murder of Theater Director José Celso Martinez’s brother and the ensuing realization that huge numbers of homosexuals are murdered in São Paulo. So we went out in the field. We had no sponsors; all we had was my VHS camera.

My motivation has always been to reveal the facts, to seek to clarify the facts that impressed me, which were always social facts, forms of oppression.

I do not consider my production as “artistic,” even though it is too, but I consider it predominantly documental and authorial.

The social, cultural and political context has always been a mainstay of my works, all done in partnership with Norma Bahia Pontes or solo.

I’m a journalist, and before I started making videos, for many years I was a writer, a translator and an editor of texts. All my video pieces are arguments edited from words, enhanced by the text editing and the image. In my videos, the editing has always been the primary factor in defending my arguments.

Temporada de Caça has been shown at festivals in Tokyo, Berlin, New York, Paris, at several universities and cultural centers in the USA and Canada, on the Brazilian TV channels Cultura and Gazeta, and it won 15 prizes in Brazil. It bears reminding that the piece was created over 20 years ago, shot in VHS using a camcorder. 

I was happy to learn that Temporada de Caça, which portrays homophobia in Brazil and was widely distributed through alternative channels, besides being screened on free-to-air TV and in international festivals, had contributed to some certain extent to reducing the murder rate, at least those in São Paulo’s Trianon Park. Unfortunately, the crimes kept happening elsewhere.

Out of the numerous “compliments,” comments and analyses of the video, I was particularly happy with the remark made by professor and essayist Arlindo Machado in his book Máquina e Imaginário (Machine and Imagery), page 266, about the first works I made in New York in partnership with Norma Bahia Pontes. These works bear a resemblance with Temporada de Caça. My style is always the same. Only the themes change. I was also very pleased with the description of Temporada de Caça in the catalog of the Kijkhuis Festival, in the Netherlands.” 

Rita Moreira in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (September 2015)