Contesting the Boundaries of Belonging in the Films of Ana Carolina Teixeira Soares

This chapter focuses on Ana Carolina's Mar de Rosas (Sea of Roses, 1977), Das Tripas Coração (Heart and Guts, 1982), and Sonho de Valsa (Dream Waltz, 1987). At a time when it was untenable to express her feminist views by way of a realist register, all three films develop a surrealist mode of expression. Indeed, Carolina's films adapt a surrealist mode of representation to critique repressive ideological constructions of femininity and seek the emancipation of the female psyche. Ultimately, her trilogy critiques those institutions and established beliefs through which presumably good, moral citizens are manufactured—the family, education, religion, romantic love, honoring the father, and the like—and reflects a desire for a new sociability and a new political system in which women are full, equal members. The gesture toward freedom in these films resonates with the second-wave women's movements and the larger struggle to escape a repressive authoritarian regime in the 1970s and 1980s.