Nossa pátria está onde somos amados - Homeland is the place where we are loved (2022)

Brazil is huge, made of an extremely colorful mix of races, origins, ideas and cultures. Now it has come to a boil: the country torn apart by political, and religious conflicts, our forests burnt down and razed to the ground, "minorities'' persecuted, and part of the population arming itself on the expectation of something wicked coming our way in the most polarized election ever. Brazil has many voices, many gods and (hopefully) many choices. But this entire nation, bigger than Europe, is united by one language. The uniformity of the Portuguese language is so unlikely, and so central to the Brazilian identity, that it has also overshadowed more than 200 indigenous languages still spoken. All the complexity of the 500 years of history that created this situation are celebrated by a singular institution, the Museum of the Portuguese Language, in São Paulo. In May 2022, to commemorate World Portuguese Language Day, for three days the museum was occupied by a series of talks, concerts, films, classes and exhibitions. What happened in those days became the subject matter of this documentary. Homeland Is the Place Where We Are Loved is an essay about the words that bring us together and may also harm our togetherness. A man who climbs a clock tower to write what became the title of this film; the Krenak activist who went to Russia to find the remains of his dead language; the ethnolinguistic who spent her life trying to convince us that Samba means "prayer"; the Yanomami shaman who came to São Paulo to explain to a bewildered audience that he feels Portuguese as a threat: they all reveal something about the power, the mystique, the violence of this language that Brazilians have been able to weaponize in novels, poems, movies, and in songs. All this is weaved through original footage vertiginously captured strictly inside the Museum. Such linguistic epiphanies can show us how a country and a language can harbor many voices, many choices. Lots of different homelands.