Un voyage au bout du souffle examines how Afro-Brazilian performative arts reshape the boundary between nature and culture in societies marked by colonial histories, enslavement and contemporary environmental pressures, opening spaces for resistance and for the reconfiguration of collective identities.

Such an undertaking requires a field-based approach capable of tracing Afro-diasporic circulations that connect Bantu traditions from Central and Southern Africa to Afro-Brazilian heritage without reproducing the epistemic violence inherited from regimes of domination — that is, by recognising the intrinsic validity of situated forms of knowledge and testimony, articulated through a polyphony of voices released from hierarchical frameworks.

White Mood addresses the psychic economy through which a person becomes attached to their own suffering because it ensures subjective coherence — and, in effect, opposes the vital force which, subterranean though decisive, seeks to carve a path through what constrains it.

The narrative follows Clara to that precise threshold where pain ceases to appear as an inevitability and reveals itself in its rawest dimension: a regime of attachment which, having failed to be recognised as such, has come to serve as a foundation. The question running through the film is not that of happiness, but the more obscure one of renouncing sorrow: under what conditions does a subject consent to shed that which, while alienating them, defines them? […]

[…] The conclusions drawn by research into coercive control — notably by Evan Stark in his work Coercive Control (2007) — strike a particular chord here. Abuse thrives through the non-intervention of those around: it relies on a system built on tacit complicity — an omerta that trivialises relationships of domination. That which remains unidentified can neither be named nor contested. It is within this space of non-recognition that White Mood unfolds its critical perspective: silent violence circulates all the more freely here because it takes forms that the context — convivial, festive —renders barely legible, even acceptable.

As Clara endeavours to disentangle herself from this spiral, the film stands out for its categorical refusal of complaint. Highly attuned to others, and too ironic in her reading of human relations to shut herself away in suffering, Clara counters what affects her with a reserve tempered by disarming frankness — her psychic life, of considerable sensory richness, is traversed by a gravity that is never complacent. Here, there is neither heroine nor victim: only a desiring subject, whose acuity is both the wound and the remedy.

[…] Through the experience of Alya — a young woman attempting to extricate herself from what Martin Seligman described as “learned helplessness“— the question arises of agency and the way in which the subject comes to internalise an external framework in order to define herself through the gaze and demands of another.

Beyond this specific case, a whole grammar of domination gradually comes into view: the novel exposes a gender-based violence that goes beyond the harm inflicted on an individual and engages with the structure of a social relationship where the asymmetry of positions allows for the capture of the body, of speech — extending to the capacity to act itself.