Songs Between Two Rivers: Melancholy Rhythms in Diasporic Docu-Fiction

After twenty years of disappearance, an estranged aunt says I have "sad eyes" like my father- an unknowing mood seeped into a face shared between two lifetimes. This exchange is where I start to find proof of a Melancholy Multiverse: a cinematic framework for viewing Afrodescending narratives bound to ambiguous loss and looping systemic tragedy. In the famous protest song, Canto das Três Raças, the Brazilian samba singer Clara Nunes sings about melancholy as a spiritual force that binds Brazilian identity across space and time. Her mournful yet danceable chorus repeats, "All the people of this land, when they sing, sing of pain." In Marcel Camus's 1959 film Black Orpheus, Antonio Carlos Jobim's lyrics play in the background for a deceitfully idyllic shot of the Rio skyline: "Sadness has no end, but happiness does." Orfeu carries an endless sadness due to the loss of Eurídice, but their love is revived across history so that he may look back at her once more.

The framework for the Melancholy Multiverse is created with inspiration from Black experimental filmmakers like Cheryl Dunye and Bill Greaves, Saidiya Hartman's principles of critical fabulation, and Antonio Bispo dos Santo's metaphor of confluence as a way to imagine counter- colonial forms of knowledge production. In this Multiverse, I re-envision specific scenes in Black Orpheus where the lead actress, Marpessa Dawn, slowly begins to converge with Tereza, my late grandmother, at the height of the film's production in Rio de Janeiro. I notice how certain facets of Tereza's life mirror that of Marpessa Dawn's, as Eurídice's mythical life also begins to show parallels with both of theirs. Blurring the lines between documentary, fiction, and myth, this project proposes a narrative repair for three women whose lives are marked by erasure. Their gazes are diverted onto each other to echo histories that feel oddly familiar. By envisioning a confluence of their narratives through the fabulated zone of the film set, an opportunity opens to shape their own present and resist the tragedies that were once pre-scripted for them.