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Fifteen afro-descendant women talk about their lives. They work hard to make a living, but they lead a parallel life: they are queens inside the carnival community and gods during the Candomble religious celebrations. Best film at CineEsquemaNovo Festival in Porto Alegre and Best documentary at Cineport in Lisbon. Nominated for UNESCO's Breaking the Chains Award.

"The most interesting aspect of the speeches registered in "Fala mulher! is that, assembled together, they lead us to a counter-hegemonic view of what it means to be black, female and poor in Brazil. The choice of topics is particularly significant. The interviewees of Fala mulher! reveal their struggle against poverty, racism and all the stigma that is imposed on black women by a male-oriented society where the whitening ideology that prevailed in the past still has strong consequences in the present. The women’s way of reconstructing their social reality varies between, on the one hand, a cheerful optimism and fantasy of being ‘queens’ and ‘princesses’ of carnival, and on the other, a deep awareness of their disadvantaged condition as members of a society where women, blacks and poor are treated as inferior citizens."

Tatiana Heise, Contested National Identities in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema, excerpt

"Fala mulher! remains one of the few examples in contemporary Brazilian cinema which systematically replaces dominant gendered and racialized discourse on women with a more complex representation of them as workers, ‘warriors’, militants, agents of social change and re-articulators of their own identities. The film is also an exception in the sense that it privileges the fluid and malleable aspects of black female identity, as opposed to fixing characters in ‘essential’ roles (mothers, lovers, whores, and so forth). The film proposes that women adopt multiple subject positions according to the different social contexts in which they find themselves. Moreover, rather than emphasize either the characters’ organic individuality or uniqueness, or their social role, Fala mulher! alternates between the two. We get both a sense of each woman’s singularity and of their part in a social and racial group which interpellates specific aspects of their identity."

Tatiana Heise, Contested National Identities in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema, excerpt