Butterfly Filmes

Thirty-five years in the life of a couple, told through 2,000 notes and family photographs. Love, jealousy, pain, resilience, and death, reflected upon by Aldir Blanc, the creator of some of the most beautiful lyrics in Brazilian popular music — including “O Bêbado e a Equilibrista” (“The Drunkard and the Tightrope Walker”), written for his wife, Mari Lúcia. Six years after Aldir’s death, the notes continue to emerge, hidden inside objects throughout the couple’s apartment in Rio de Janeiro’s Tijuca neighborhood. Mari revisits forgotten moments and opens the moving treasure trove of notes in the year Aldir — who died of COVID-19 in 2020 — would have turned 80.

Portugal, Brazil and Cape Verde. Countries linked by the sea and the culture of nostalgia. The film travels across three continents and finds characters marked by absences produced by events that transform the history of these countries. Like fascism, colonization, slavery, dictatorships and leaving never to return. The culture of saudade is the thread that connects conversations by the sea.