Ecstasy

In Clara’s life, the personal and political are intertwined. She lives with her parents in the outskirts of São Paulo that is slowly being taken over by organized crime. As her mother becomes a congresswoman in Brasilia, her family moves to the Federal District. There as Clara feels her mother’s life is increasingly imperilled, she descends into a downward spiral of self-destruction in which suffering has a life force. The less she eats, the more power and energy Clara feels she has. Starving herself, Clara plunges into a routine based on calculations, repetition, and ritual: she ceases to menstruate and begins to experience an ecstasy in controlling time. She attempts to devise a geometry of hunger, an impossible theorem where her calculations of destruction at once incite liberation. At the age of 15, with 37 heartbeats per minute and weighing 29 kilos on a body of 1,64 m, Clara is hospitalized.