Betânia

Betânia is 65 and a stalwart family matriarch. In the wake of her husband’s death, her daughters persuade her to move back to the village where she was born and where the rest of her family still live. The village lies on the edge of the sand dunes of the Lençóis Maranhenses national park in the Brazilian state of Maranhão, in a newly desertified region not so far from the Amazon. Betânia leaves behind her simple, agrarian lifestyle without electricity and arrives in a place where tradition and modernity collide. Pushed by the ancestral sound of Maranhão, Betânia and her family fight to maintain their sense of identity. Despite the imposing sand dunes, polluted water, financial hardship and intergenerational quarrels, life finds a way, as it always does. In 2018, Marcelo Botta filmed a documentary in the Lençóis Maranhenses national park. In Betânia, he addresses the ecological and socio-cultural problems in the villages whose desert oases are threatened by the encroaching sands. (Berlinale)