Window of the Soul

Janela da alma is a documentary about the sense of vision and the act of seeing in a predominantly visual world. Through interviews with 19 people who suffer from different kinds of visual impairment (short-sightedness, squint, partial and total blindness, etc.), it discusses the significance of vision in our contemporary society. It covers issues such as the physiology of vision, the impact of wearing glasses on people’s personalities and body image, the meaning of seeing and not being able to see, the paradox of not being able to see the inner dimensions of human beings and the loss of the capacity to see in a world saturated by images. As Nobel Prize winner José Saramago states: ‘We live in an amusement park where images multiply. We feel lost; first of all, lost to ourselves; then, lost in relation to the world. […] We are wandering without knowing what we are, what we are for…’
Interviewees range from other celebrities such as Hermeto Paschoal, Wim Wenders, the blind Czech photographer Evgen Bavcar and Oliver Sacks, to poets such as Antônio Cícero and Manoel de Barros, to the literature teacher Paulo César Lopes, to the artist Carmela Gross, to the actress Marieta Severo, to the writer João Ubaldo, to the filmmaker Walter Lima Jr., to the councilman Arnaldo Godoy, etc. Beautiful and non-conventional images of empty deserts, burning trees and blurred streetlights at night link the various fragments of interview. There are black-and-white sequences with quiet background music.