I wander through the silent corridors of a theater until I reach my mother’s dressing room. I open the door: she is alone, touching up her makeup with a fragile elegance, as if she were unknowingly wearing her own past. When she notices the camera, she smiles awkwardly. In the virtual production theater, the LED screens turn on by themselves, projecting old handycam footage fragmented, slowed, distorted. The place is empty yet hypnotic. My voice-over recalls the beginning of a personal investigation born from a shared fear among the women of my family, as if a curse could repeat itself.

In the archival material, I appear too, filming and listening. I revisit an interview with my aunt Isabella in my grandmother’s garden in Brazil. Between glasses of water and wine, she talks about the “invisible threads” binding our lineage and the day she was abused during a Candomblé ceremony. She says she faced the monster and survived.

The LED wall goes dark: NO SIGNAL. Brazilian landscapes appear, houses, dusty roads. My video diary continues as I travel with a small crew near an old fazenda. Guided by photos my parents took in ‘91, I reconstruct places where my great-great-grandmother lived, gave birth, perhaps died. I film lights being assembled, actors in makeup, scenes prepared for the LED wall.

In the sugarcane fields, a young girl appears, playing hide-and-seek. Maybe African, Indigenous, Arab. She whispers she is my ancestor. Her memories are fragmented: she doesn’t know if she had seven or eight children, was called “wild” for sleeping on the ground, liked being Christian. Suddenly she freezes and vanishes into the cane. A harsh light breaks the spell.

Back in the theater, my mother and her sister step onstage, recalling childhood rituals baths, trances, sacrifices. Actors reenact these memories while real Candomblé footage fills the LED wall. An elder enters, becomes a demonic figure, and announces a family curse. My mother asks what she must do; he cannot intervene.

The theater shifts into a Brazilian Protestant church. The elder becomes a pastor; a deliverance ritual unfolds. My mother burns photographs in an act of purification.

Later, she recognizes the girl in the cane: the great-great-grandmother. Onstage, now a house, familiar objects materialize. The ghost girl runs on the LED wall; a house burns with her inside. My mother watches in silence. Lying down, she hears a voice in Portuguese guiding her. A soft light touches her face. A hand wakes her: my grandmother’s.

We are in her real garden. The women of the family gather. The ghost girl sits among them. My mother caresses her hair, she is no longer alone. The camera moves back, revealing the garden filled with the living and the departed. The girl’s serene face dissolves.

Only then do we see it: the garden is a projection on the LED wall. A memory that exists only in reconstruction. Reality cannot hold all this. Only cinema can.