New York, NY – Cinema Slate is proud to announce the New York theatrical release of Caetano Gotardo’s feature debut The Moving Creatures on Friday, September 11, 2015, at Cinema Village. The film was written and directed by Caetano Gotardo and features songs by Gotardo and Marco Dutra (Hard Labor). It stars Cida Moreira (as Maria Júlia), Andrea Marquee (as Silvia), Fernanda Vianna (as Ana) and Rômulo Braga (as Eduardo).

“Monologues in the forms of songs of surprise and sometimes sorrow punctuate each one of these absorbing pieces that detail the profound meaning children bring to our lives.”
– Jaie Laplante. Miami International Film Festival

The second film in the ongoing Brazilian Film Series: Year One (afterI Touched All Your Stuff, to be released on August 28), The Moving Creatures was an Official Selection at the Miami International Film Festival and won a Best Actress (Cida Moreira) and Best Film (Fiction) award at Berlin’s Latin American Film Festival (Lakino).

Available on the same day in theaters and, exclusively, to Fandor subscribers, The Moving Creatures will open in other markets during the Fall.

For an updated list of theatrical engagements, as well as a list of additional VOD availability, check The Moving Creatures on Cinema Slate’s official website.

In Caetano Gotardo’s lyrical omnibus film The Moving Creatures, three very different mothers are confronted, through three very different trials-by-ordeal, with the limits of what a mother “just knows”. With little fanfare (and not a whiff of the blatant “interconnectedness” often de rigeur among multi-story films), the daily rhythms and textures of three families unfold before us – and at the end of each story, all three mothers arrive at an understanding that can only be expressed by erupting the film’s very reality.

Still image of Cida Moreira from The Moving Creatures

In the film’s first story, a mother (Maria Júlia, played by famed Brazilian actress, singer and performer Cida Moreira), learns about her son’s most intimate secret. On the second tale, an enigmatically afflicted sound engineer (Eduardo, played by Rômulo Braga) skulks through his day of nausea and confusion, while his wife Silvia (Andréa Marquee) muses on the scope of infant wisdom with a friend, as the two gaze at the former’s child. What happens next throws both parents into a state of shock.

The last story follows João (Henrique Schafer) and Ana (Fernanda Vianna) on their preparations to re-encounter their long-lost son.

While The Moving Creatures is by and large as diegetically sober as a Rossellini or Dogme film, each act concludes with its respective mother breaking the codes of realism – and into song. For director Gotardo, who skeletally (and almost incidentally) gleaned the film’s material from three news items, music was the fitting choice of expressing the inexpressible.

For some, such untrained speak-singing about sex crimes and the life-lessons of arcade games may induce titters, but for the receptive, these moments are salient entries in the inscrutable lexicon of the heart.