Private Footage

In 2018, the filmmaker discovered a 16mm footage online, capturing a white family's trip to South Africa during the 1960s. The seemingly innocent scenes triggered an insatiable investigation. In a meticulous desktop sequence, Nagata dissected the footage, revealing hidden Apartheid narratives, and transforming the private archive into a poignant exploration of South Africa's troubled past.

'The footage, which at the beginning seemed quite spontaneous because of its private and familiar aspect, gradually became a striking document on the colonial past of a country. The curious scenes depicted on it, which at first seemed vaguely uneasy, shortly began to haunt us with its uncomfortable frame choices and awkward triggered gestures. The violence underneath the footage material then came up. How to deal with these images from our particular worldview in Brazil? That is the question we pose when we choose the structure of a desktop movie to investigate the origins of this material, whose traces were puzzlingly hidden on the internet.' - Janaína NAGAT