Düsseldorf-based boutique collective Patras Spannou Film has launched international sales of Brazilian Janaina Marquez’s debut feature, “Fiz Um Foguete Imaginando Que Você Vinha” (Imagining Your Arrival I Assembled a Rocket).
The pickup comes ahead of the film’s world premiere in the Forum section of the Berlin Film Festival, an important starting point for more experimental and first-time auteur-driven indie films.
For Patra Supanou, this acquisition is in line with its festival-first strategy, working with producers to position its launch into the festival market, as well as representing international rights to distinctive independent works and documentaries.
“I Made a Rocket Imagining Your Arrival” is about Rosa (Veronica Cavalcanti), a woman in her 50s, who is asked to “think of happy memories” during an MRI scan, which prompts her to search for her mother, Dalva (Luciana Souza).
Darva’s absence is related to a decisive event. She was imprisoned for killing a man who had tried to kill a woman, and that trauma shaped Rosa’s adult life.
Marquez structures the film as a memory-driven road movie, cutting across Rosa’s clinical present and the imagined reunion she forges with her mother.
This work adds to the canon of contemporary female-led writers, adding touches of magical realism and strange emotional sensibilities.
“Our own bodies end up accepting certain aspects of delirium as a means of survival,” Marquez says, framing imagination as a survival strategy.
Director Marquez said the film was made from Rosa’s point of view. The locations change according to her emotions, and the sound design links what she actually lived with what she imagined.
Conceived during the height of the pandemic in Brazil, she added, the film’s emphasis on joy and compassion is an intentional response to a moment of acute crisis.
Creative lineage and production
“I Made a Rocket Imagining Your Arrival” is Márquez’s first full-length work following his embellished short works. A graduate of Cuba’s EICTV and Spain’s Universidad Carlos III, she broke out with the short film Los Minutos, Las Olas, which premiered at the Cinéfondation in Cannes and went on to win awards in Clermont-Ferrand, San Sebastian, Havana and elsewhere.
The film is produced by Maurício Macêdo of Moçambique Audiovisual, based in the northeastern Brazilian city of Fortaleza. Delírio Filmesis is also the producer of the film. Moçambique Audiovisual also sells domestically with consultation from Fistaile.
Institutional and partner support includes the Instituto Mirante de Arte e Cultura, the high-profile philanthropy Projeto Paradiso, Show Me The Fund, and the Brazilian Embassy in Berlin.
