“A documentary about the dead and how they continue to affect the lives of the living.”

João Vieira Torres dreams about his mother. There is an entire ocean between them. He is in France, and she is in Brazil. This dream seems to come at the precise moment his French citizenship is granted: a new ID card and a new birth certificate. In a way, a man dies and a new one is born. It’s no wonder that in the dream he tells his mother about his desire to search for the children his grandmother, Aurora, helped deliver as a midwife, hoping to learn more about the woman she was – a person he never really knew or even remembers, since she passed away when he was still a small kid. The result of this search is his film Aurora, an intimate portrait of two different lives in Brazil: one that his grandmother lived, and the other a myth created by her family’s memories. 

In many ways, Aurora is a documentary about the dead and how they continue to affect the lives of the living. Here Torres’ life is the first to be affected. So, as he finds a new home in France, living in an idyllic old library building in a relationship with two other men, his ghosts demand attention. One must have a home first to be haunted. No wonder then that while he was still in transit between Brazil and France, his dreams momentarily stopped. But now, as his life as a French man begins, he must confront his Brazilian past.  

This is why he returns home and begins interviewing his family members about their stories, about his grandmother, and finally about the children she helped deliver, for it’s a well-known fact in this family that for over forty years not a single woman died in her hands. Unfortunately, as the interviews progress and we learn about Aurora – her past, the suffering she endured and the harm she caused – Torres’ search for some kind of relief and redemption feels misguided and even entitled. A problem that could have been resolved by making this either a movie about his migration process and struggle with his identity or one solely focused on Aurora and the women’s lives she touched along the way. 

As a result we learn that Torres, despite facing hardships when arriving in France, managed to find friendship and love. Eventually he obtained his citizenship papers, and even his family’s thoughts about his sexuality are portrayed in a lighter way, showing how much each family member grew and changed as time passed. In this context, it’s significant to observe how incompatible the segments about Torres’ life – whether in France or Brazil – feel in relation to the parts in which he lets his grandmother take center stage. 

Aurora, despite never having learned to read or write, delivered babies and saved women’s lives for over forty years. A complex woman who raised equally complex women. There is a crucial moment in Aurora when Torres interviews two aunts about their mother. One of them says that Cida – the eldest daughter – was chosen by Aurora to carry a heavy burden: to stop being only a daughter, and take care of the family when she was gone. This is why Cida became so depressed. In the same conversation, Torres learns how Cida almost died during childbirth due to medical malpractice. Aurora was not there for her daughter. We also learn about Torres’ great-grandmother, a native woman who was kidnapped by a white man and forced into marriage. Here, Aurora becomes a film about women who sacrificed themselves for their families and also about their female descendants, who were cursed to either repeat or be affected by their ancestors’ mistakes. 

Once again, Aurora’s main problem is that, despite its beautiful smaller pieces, they never seem to fit together to create something cohesive. The puzzle pieces seem forced together, rather than designed to form a larger and coherent picture. As expected, the deeper Torres delves into his family’s past, the clearer this becomes, as seen when he gets mad after learning about how the press reported the death of a woman from his family who was killed by her lover. The killer is always portrayed as acting out of jealousy or momentary madness. The killer is a man who never seems capable of committing such a horrible crime, while the women are questioned about their marital status, what they were wearing, whether they provoked the man, or what they could have done to avoid making him angry at all. The irony is that, in a film initially about a midwife named Aurora and the women of her family, Torres is the one speaking for them – and, in a way, over them.