Justice, Like Water through Stone

The winner of six international film festival prizes, Maria Augusta Ramos’s Justice combines Frederick Wiseman’s cool-headed and clear-eyed portrayals of large institutions or societal systems with the power of a courtroom drama. Ramos reveals larger issues in contemporary Brazilian society and its power structures by studying the details of several cases and following them through various stages of the country’s court system. In addition to filming scenes in public offices and courtrooms, which offer their own form of public theater, Ramos travels to holding cells and the homes of judges and defendants. (102 mins., video)

Marília Rocha’s Like Water through Stone sensitively tracks the coming-of-age of a group of girls in the remote, rural mountains of Minas Gerais. Encounters with men and the larger world have started to leave scars on their bodies and on their psyches. As the film progresses, a bond clearly develops between its subjects and crew, with the tension between freedom and obligation becoming a subtle element of the film’s content and form. Rocha is a member of Teia, a talented collective of filmmakers in Belo Horizonte, whose films have gathered attention in Brazil and at film festivals around the world. (85 mins., 35mm)