(35 mm, 16 min, color, 1991) Noeli is one meter and fifty eight cm tall and weighs fifty four kilos. Noeli is a housewife and has two children. She's an ordinary person. But there are no ordinary people.

Photo by Carlos Gerbase: Noeli Cavalheiro

Director: Jorge Furtado

Executive Producer: Nora Goulart and Ana Luiza Azevedo
Written by: Jorge Furtado
Cinematographer: Alex Sernambi
Art Director: Fiapo Barth
Music by: Leo Henkin
Production Coordinator: Dainara Soares
Editor: Giba Assis Brasil
Assistant Director: Ana Luiza Azevedo

A Casa de Cinema PoA Production

Main Cast:
Noeli Cavalheiro (testimony)
José Mayer (narration) 

FULL CAST AND CREW

Prizes

• 19th Gramado Film Festival, 1991:
  Best Film (Critic's Prize), Best Direction, Best Regional Film, Best Direction of Regional Film, Best Edition of Regional Film.

• 4th International Short Film Festival, Clermont-Ferrand, France, 1992:
  Best Film.
• 1st Latinoamerican Film Festival, Caracas, Venezuela, 1993:
  Best Short Film.

Reviews

"This is a different Brazil, the one investigated by the two Brazilian shorts produced for the TV series SOUTH of UK's Channel Four. No beaches, no carnival, no shantytowns. No tropical country (...) In THIS IS NOT YOUR LIFE, Jorge Furtado celebrates ordinary life, anonymity, the voices of street corners, as he focuses his film on the testimony of Noeli Cavalheiro, a housewife from the south of Brazil, chosen at random. It is a talented, high-tech re-reading of Neo-realism."
(Amir Labaki, FOLHA DE SÃO PAULO, 29/08/91)

"THIS IS NOT YOUR LIFE is born out of the realization, by Jorge Furtado, that outside the strictly personal scope, most people do not exist, except in the cold shape of figures and generalizing formulas. (...) The first images show fragments of human bodies, while the sound track emits a text with the sentence 'your anonymity is your security', addressed, naturally, to the spectator."
(Fernando Marques, CORREIO BRAZILIENSE, 17/09/91)

"In his second solo work (...), Jorge Furtado shows the same talent and creativity of his previous works. Using a fragmented narrative that never bores the audience, he removes from anonymity somebody chosen at random. A face in the crowd of anonymous beings that walk the streets and avenues of big cities, and will never have their 15 minutes of glory. The person chosen, however, proves to have a life that is has a wealth of human aspects, a way of speaking and expressing herself without lies or hypocrisy."
(Tuio Becker, ZERO HORA, 27/03/92) 

07/08/1991