Coraci Ruiz | Brazil | 2020
77 min | Full Subtitles
Co-presented by Hot Docs
A poetic autobiographical documentary made by mother and filmmaker Coraci Ruiz as she follows the revelation of her eldest son, then 15 years old, that he is having doubts about his gender identity. Realizing that she will have to deal with a new and highly challenging theme, she decides to start filming. This is her way of wrestling with her own understanding of her son’s journey, as she works to grasp his experience and what is happening.
While Coraci grew up in Brazil's optimistic phase of democratization after twenty years of military dictatorship, the beginning of her son's process of questioning and transition coincides with the legal-parliamentary coup that, by means of an impeachment, removed President Dilma Roussef from power. Her son works to define and claim his identity in a time marked by a conservative breakthroughs, an authoritarian upsurge and increased oppression of minorities, who are deemed enemies by President Jair Bolsonaro. But at its heart Threshold is a gentle and insightful documentary about loving one for who they are and the dynamics of support through difficult times of discovery.
DIRECTORS BIO
Coraci Ruiz
Coraci Ruiz has a degree in Dance (2002), a Master in Audiovisual Culture and Media (2009) and a PhD in Multimedia (2020), all from Unicamp (SP/Brazil). Also part of her background is the 2005 EICTV documentary filmmaking workshop.She has been a documentary filmmaker since 2003, when she participated in the foundation of the production company Laboratorio Cisco. She works mainly as director and director of photography for documentaries. Among her main productions are the feature films Threshold (2020) and Letters to Angola (2012), which has participated in more than 30 festivals in 16 countries and was awarded prizes in Brazil, Angola, Portugal and Belgium; and the short films Nostalgia: Video Letters to Cuba (2005), Another City (2009), Letters from Exile (2015) and Strong Feather (2019). She is currently working on a feature film Blooming on the Asphalt (selected for the LAB DOC of DOCSP 2020, with tutoring by Marta Andreu, and for the WIP of Conecta Chile, is expected to premiere in 2021).
