BEFORE “ADOLESCENCE” is our retrospective and critical gaze on a contemporary phenomenon. The starting point is the Netflix documentary series Adolescence — a work that is reshaping how we perceive adolescence in the digital age. Its impact has been so profound that the UK government announced it would screen the series in public schools as a pedagogical tool to address mental health, social media, and young people’s emotional well-being.

This series acts as an urgent mirror, reflecting a generation shaped by algorithms, likes, and invisible anxiety. But this cycle offers a different gesture: to look before all that. Before the selfie, before the feed, before the sanitised language of influencers and healing content. Cinema has always been there, capturing the anguish, rage, and desire of youth.

We begin with Ken Park (2002), by Larry Clark and Edward Lachman — a controversial film, banned in several countries, portraying teenagers in complete disconnection from adults. Sex, violence, loneliness, and helplessness appear as forms of expression and escape. It is an uncomfortable, raw film — and perhaps for that reason, necessary. Because there are realities that comfort will never reach.

On the same night, we dive even deeper into strangeness with Afterschool (2008), by Antonio Campos. A boarding school student accidentally records the death of two classmates. But the real subject of the film is not death — it’s apathy. Coldness. The absence of reaction in a world saturated with images. A disturbing mirror of our relationship with technology and the gradual erosion of empathy.

On Saturday, we close with the emotional storm of Mommy (2014), by Xavier Dolan. A film about a widowed mother and her teenage son with behavioural disorders — and about the visceral, chaotic, violent love that binds them. A film that captivates with its formal beauty and devastates with its emotional rawness. Adolescence here is a whirlwind. And love, an attempt to tame the chaos.

What these films share with Adolescence is the courage to dig deep. These are works that reject the comfort of metaphor and go straight into the flesh of youth. They offer us images and characters who do not want to be saved, but to be understood. They ask us to abandon judgment and to listen without filters.

This cycle is, above all, an act of listening. BEFORE “ADOLESCENCE” is not nostalgia, nor a critique of the present. It is an invitation to revisit stories that — without mobile screens or hashtags — already signalled the urgency of looking inward. Adolescence remains a territory of excess, but also of revelation. These films show it unapologetically.

And as always at PROSA, the film doesn’t end when the screen goes dark. The most important moment begins when the lights come on. We talk. We listen. We confront. Because it is in that moment — after the credits — that each spectator transforms what they saw into something personal. And collective.

(Curatorship of Alexandre Braga)