Eliza Capai

Eliza Capai is a Brazilian documentary filmmaker whose work has focused on political participation, environmental conflict and reproductive rights. Her feature *Tão Longe É Aqui* (2013) follows a journey through Africa, with women’s experiences central to its account. Capai later directed *O Jabuti e a Anta* (2016), a documentary about the effects of large hydroelectric projects in the Brazilian Amazon. The film connects dam construction to the lives of people who depend on the region’s rivers, examining the human consequences of projects often described chiefly in terms of energy production.

Capai’s *Espero Tua (Re)Volta* (2019), released internationally as *Your Turn*, follows Brazilian student activists. Its starting point is the occupation of public schools in São Paulo in 2015, when students opposed a state government plan to reorganize the school system. The documentary also follows the wider student movement through subsequent protests and political changes. Young participants speak for themselves, while footage of demonstrations and school occupations shows how they organized and communicated. At the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival, *Your Turn* received the Amnesty International Film Prize, bringing international attention to the students’ account of events.

In *Incompatível com a Vida* (2023), Capai turns to a subject rooted in her own experience: receiving a diagnosis that a pregnancy was incompatible with life. The film brings her story into conversation with those of other women who faced grave fetal diagnoses. Their accounts address pregnancy loss, decisions about care and the difficulty of discussing abortion in Brazil, where access is legally restricted. Its title, meaning “incompatible with life,” refers to medical language used for conditions expected to prevent a baby’s survival. By asking women to describe what happened in their own words, Capai makes the experience behind that clinical phrase the documentary’s subject.

These films address distinctly Brazilian disputes as well as experiences that cross borders. *O Jabuti e a Anta* examines what an Amazonian infrastructure project means for people living near it; *Your Turn* records students challenging decisions about their schools; and *Incompatível com a Vida* considers how medical and legal circumstances shape pregnancy. Together with the encounters filmed in *Tão Longe É Aqui*, they show Capai returning to a concrete question: who gets to explain a consequential event? In each documentary, the people living through it are not merely background to an official account. Their testimony is essential to understanding the decisions, conflicts and consequences the film records.