This film features my two children four years after Dam Butterfly (vimeo.com/211697322/settings) was shot. in the film my son is seen walking around in a Park. As in a refrain, he is seen holding his little sister by a rope, as she hovers in the air harnessed to a pair of huge helium balloons.
My son’s body is covered with tattoos that embody the option of letting go of his sister and release her to the sky. The tattoos are shaped like a dense chronological map of grieving signs which, had he been forced to live with the guilt of dropping the rope, he would have filled the surface of his body with them his entire life. Among the marks tattooed on my son’s organs is the poem Macoal, parts of which are seen in the film overlapping with the soundtrack.
The soundtrack features the poem read in my voice under the influence of helium gas, which enables my voice to shift across ages and genders. In the background, we can hear music that punctuates the poem and emphasizes its different parts, as well as the sounds of a “butterfly harp”, birthday balloons, earing clicks and a choir whose members are also under the influence of helium.
Macoal is shot in an infrared camera, which makes the children, the clouds, and the young vegetation look albino-like. The film is composed of the shots in the park, close-ups of the tattoos, shots taken while skydiving over the clouds above the coastal plain, and shots of the sky taken from the roof of my house in the course of three seasons, from fall to spring.
