An intense teenage romance morphs into a hypnotic tale of resurrection and saudade in this visually lush meditation on all-consuming love from emerging Brazilian director Alice Furtado.
Love and desire [walk] hand in hand as a double-edged sword. They enhance each other but can also be a very destructive (and yet, powerful) combination.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2020
Sick, Sick, Sick 2019
Sem Seu Sangue
A fever dream of love sickness and female desire, Alice Furtado’s moody debut feature centres on Silvia (mesmerising newcomer Luiza Kosovski), a brooding teenager whose first love arrives in the form of bad boy Artur. Silvia’s attraction to this new and destabilising presence in the classroom is uncontrollable; they hook up immediately and spend every waking moment together, that is until Artur’s life is cut short by his haemophilia in an otherwise ordinary accident.
Exploring Silvia’s grief in a series of elegiac, slow-burning episodes, Furtado’s narrative draws blood from both genre film inspiration and personal heartbreak. Manifesting first literally in an unexplained illness, then existentially through an obsession with voodoo and bringing Artur back from the dead, Silvia’s journey from love to loss, and then loss to longing, metastasises as a kind of pure cinematic reverie.
Tutored by Claire Denis as a student, the influence of the French auteur’s sensual aesthetic runs deep in Furtado’s style, while echoes of horror touchstones I Walked with a Zombie and Pet Semetary quietly reverberate. A striking first film with a real sensibility for desire as an uncanny and intoxicating force.
About the Filmmaker
Alice Furtado is a filmmaker and editor. A graduate in cinema at Universidade Federal Fluminense (Brazil) and a post graduate at Le Fresnoy (France), her debut feature Sick, Sick, Sick premiered at Cannes in the Directors’ Fortnight section in 2019.