Using the filmmaker’s own archival images, Quando Perdi a Cabeça / When I Lost My Head follows a body that narrates the symbolic loss of its own head. The archive ceases to function as evidence and becomes a terrain of doubt, showing that to remember is also to create other ways of existing in the present.
LANGUAGE : Portuguese COUNTRY : Brazil YEAR : 2025 DURATION : 7m DIRECTOR, ARTIST : Ramayana Lira de Sousa TEXT, NARRATION, EDITING : Ramayana Lira de Sousa
Director statement :Quando Perdi a Cabeça / When I Lost My Head emerges from an encounter with my own archive, a space often understood as a repository of truth, continuity, and identity. While revisiting these images, I realized that they no longer served as evidence of a stable past. Instead, they opened fissures, zones of uncertainty where memory slips, fractures, and recomposes itself. The film begins in this tension. By following a body that narrates the symbolic loss of its own head, I seek to explore how subjectivity is shaped not only by what we remember but by what eludes us, by what refuses to settle into narrative coherence. The decapitated body becomes a metaphor for a self in transition, detached from the imperatives of recognition and linearity. Through this gesture, the archive transforms into a living terrain, capable of generating new temporalities and ways of inhabiting the present. My intention is not to reconstruct a past but to expose its instability, making visible the operations of imagination, desire, and doubt that accompany the act of remembering. In Quando Perdi a Cabeça, memory becomes invention. The film invites the viewer to consider that losing one’s head, one’s reference points, one’s fixed self, may be a way to reclaim the possibility of becoming otherwise.
Bio : Ramayana Lira de Sousa is a Brazilian scholar, filmmaker, curator and professor at UniSul (Brazil), where she teaches in the Cinema & Audiovisual course and the Graduate Program in Language Sciences. Her artistic work spans video-essay, visual arts and curatorial projects, often exploring bodies, memory, gender and dissident sexualities. Through pieces such as Quando Perdi a Cabeça and other experimental works, she uses image, archive and performative gesture to challenge norms and propose new forms of existence and representation.
Pebbles Underground is focused on showcasing and promoting experimental, avant-garde, underground, and no-to-low budget projects by artist-humans from all over the world. Absurd, uncanny, witty, humorous, slow-video – all are welcomed, and loved.
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