Filmmaker Marianna Brennand notes that familial abuse is something ”that starts happening really subtly.” No one really believes that someone “that you trust and is so close to you, someone that should be protecting you” could be capable of sexually abusing you.
The stark topic of child sexual abuse is at the core of Brennand’s film Manas, set on Marajó Island where the Amazon empties into the Atlantic.
Manas is the result of eight years of research where she and colleagues interviewed young girls and their families “about this very specific reality that happens in the north of Brazil,” she explains, “in this very specific social, political, economical context. But sexual violence happens everywhere, and familial abuse happens next door to us.”
The film’s screenplay was shaped and written by Felipe Sholl, Marcelo Grabowsky, Brennand, Antonia Pellegrino, Camila Agustini and Carolina Benevides.
On Sunday night, Brennand will be the recipient of the Kering and Festival du Cannes 2025 Women in Motion Emerging Talent Award because of the stunning achievement that Manas is.
Kering and the festival will bestow Oscar winner Nicole Kidman with its 10th Women in Motion Award, the organization’s highest honor. Brennand is thrilled that Manas will be in the room tonight where important things can be made to happen.
Brennand chose to fictionalize the research results rather than have the young girls they’d interviewed relive their trauma in front of a camera.
In a sense, turning the reality into drama has enabled her to dig deeper.
In Manas, Jamilli Correa plays Marcielle, known as Tielle, and we realize that there’s something untoward going on when she finds that the ropes of the hammock she sleeps in have been cut. She has no other choice but to cuddle up beside her father in his bed.
Her pregnant mother prefers to sleep separately. Brennand says the mother is significant in “this perverse cycle of abusive relationships“ because what happens to Tielle happened to her as well.
“I met so many women and I heard so many stories through my research,” Brennand says when we meet at a cafe a block away from the Palais de Festivals. “Usually it’s like a woman seeing her mother go through that. It happened to her mother, it happened to her grandmother, it happened to her sister, it happened to her aunt. So it’s just really something that’s become normalized,” she laments.
Because of harrowing court cases that I covered many years ago, and because my wife once worked for a charity that campaigned to prevent cruelty to children, and for other reasons too, I’m more aware than I ever should be of the denial in families where child abuse has occurred.
“It’s really out in the open. People see, but they pretend they do not see, maybe they think that’s the only possible way to exist,” Brennand sighs.
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We come back to the noun normalization. ”There’s nothing normal in abusing a child or a woman. And it happens. And it happens all the time. You see the MeToo movement and look how hard it was for women, even powerful women in the industry, to come out and speak their truth and ask for help — and be believed.”
“The fault and the shame,” says Brennand, shaking her head with incredulity, “is always down to the woman.”
She mentions Giséle Pelicot, who was abused by her husband in the most heinous manner over a nine-year period and argued that “shame has to change sides.”
Brennand continues: “The shame is not ours, and I think that’s so huge, so important for us to realize the shame should be in the abuser. The fault is the abuser, not ours. But society has just glued that fault and that shame on us.”
We live in a patriarchal, misogynist society, she adds, “where people think they have the right over our bodies. The right to do whatever they want with us.”
She shows me a large red button that reads: MANAS SUPPORT MANAS (Sisters Support Sisters).
There are women “supporting each other and being supported to break the silence,” she says. “That’s our movement in Brazil, but this is a universal reality.”
Manas opened in Brazil a few days ago, and the Women in Motion honor will bring wider awareness to both the film and its subject matter.
Strangely, Manas is a beautiful piece of cinema. The locale, for starters, is breathtaking. Brennand and her producers found a river that looked very much like the Tajapuru River, which is huge and has a dark-colored water.
The sound design was constructed “to really provoke this sensorial experience to put you inside Tielle’s soul,” starting with the sounds of the forest ,and you hear the water lapping at the wooden structures where they live. As the abuse becomes more intense, “the sound becomes more psychological,” she says.
And the sounds in the film should be listened to by the largest audience possible. Brennand says that in parts of rural Brazil, there’s no sex education at all. I counter that by saying in major cities in the UK, and more than likely in the U.S. as well, there’s little or no sex education in classrooms.
What’s so vital about the film and it being championed by Kering and the festival is that it allows exposure to a sensitive subject.
Brennand won the 2024 Venice Days Director’s Prize for Manas, so that and Sunday’s prestigious award allows her time and space to develop two further feature films.
One is an adaptation of a contemporary Brazilian book written by a female author who, for now, she declines to name.
The second film project will be based on research she’s made on psychological violence against women. Brennand says she’ll be very busy for “as long as we keep suffering in having to fight for our existence.”
Kidman’s going to want to have a long chat with Brennand at the Kering dinner.
The post Kering & Cannes Film Festival To Honor Brazilian Filmmaker Marianna Brennand With Prestigious Women In Motion Prize Alongside Nicole Kidman At Glitzy Sunday Night Soiree appeared first on Deadline.
