"Que Bom te Ver Viva" ("How Nice to See You Alive") examines with careful attention the situations faced by women who fell victim of prisons
and tortures during the military dictatorship in Brazil and how they led their lives in the following years. The film follows two fronts: interviews
with the real women who faced those situations; and a fictionalized with Irene Ravache playing a nameless character who went through similar ordeals
and she shares a series of feelings and memories in a series of monologues. They are greatly intertwined with each other.
With such combination, Lucia Murat delivered a fantastic, serious and
courageous experience that reveal a great deal about a dark moment in Brazil's history, and it also brings a positive story about courage and hope for
better days, showing that it is possible to endure and survive insane moments where everything seemed to indicate one could be easily broken. The
resilience of the human experience speaks higher than any physical matter and those women proved such notion.
The fiction: Ravache's monologues feel authentic, real to the core and it was composed by selecting the many stories told by the eight real women
featured here (the one not credited shared her testimony anonymously). The character gave an interview to a newspaper which twsited some of her words,
and even painted her torturer as a nice member of society, and from then on to the reaction to the invisible characters in her life, she talks about what
she suffered in prison, the tortures and traumas, and how to reinvent herself in the present society as a free woman with a dark past, how to enjoy life
without forgetting what happened to her, knowing that this will be an important part of her life. The actress brings pain, joy, sorrow, feelings of revenge
and even some humor (yes, one can laugh of things, life goes on and musn't be stopped because of a near tragic event). It's a stellar moving performance,
you truly believe that such woman existed, even if we didn't had the real ones presented here. It's a phenomenal performance by Ireve Ravache.
The documentary: the hard part to watch at times since there are many painful and terrible stories being shared, at times the women break down and
cry, but at the same time they also share about their lives after prison and how many great things happened to them, how they managed to form households,
and some of them were still dealing with politics, trying to educate society about the past or fighting for the release of documents from the period which
covered those prisons, tortures and disappearances. For those with interest on history and the military regime, you'll find quality and excellence with all
the stories shared here - there are several news clippings being shown as well.
My small objection to it, just on the real part, was the interviews with family and friends of the victims plus the capturing of their daily
lives and routine at work or at home. The interviews, though needed to present a view outside of the person herself, feels staged and scripted at times,
and I do feel that all the women got exactly what was needed in great detail; what comes from others sound excessive at times.
As a whole "Que Bom te Ver Viva" is a unique and powerfully memorable experience and a must-see by all accounts. 9/10.
