Ciclo Luzes na Caverna IX:
”A imagem como
cartografia do sonho.”:
“THE FALL” 2006 | M/12 | 1h57’ [US]
De Tarsem Singh

_ENG

Lights in the Cave IX Cinema Screenings: “The image as the cartography of the dream.”:
“THE FALL” 2006 | M/12 | 1h57’ [US]
Directed by Tarsem Singh
With Alexandre Braga

THE FALL displaces narrative into a territory where imagination ceases to be refuge and becomes a field of ethical tension. The story emerges from a radical asymmetry: a wounded adult, suspended between life and the desire to cease, and a child whose trust has not yet been eroded by the world. Between them unfolds a fable that does not reveal — it contaminates. Each fabulous image already carries the mark of the pain that generated it, and each narrative gesture dangerously blurs the line between care and manipulation. What kind of truth emerges when storytelling ceases to be an innocent act and becomes a strategy of survival? In The Fall, cinema does not offer consolation: it exposes the fragility of the narrative pact, showing how imagination can be, at once, shelter and weapon, provisional cure and moral fall.

The LUZES NA CAVERNA cycle continues with the screening of The Fall (2006), by Tarsem Singh, a singular work on imagination as an ambiguous force of connection and deviation. Situated between the clinical space of the hospital and the delirious vastness of the tale being told, the film follows the improbable relationship between Roy, a man immobilized by pain and disillusionment, and Alexandria, a child whose capacity for listening has not yet been captured by adult cynicism.

Here, cinema does not document reality — it reconfigures it.

The fantastic narrative does not function as decorative escape, but as an active operation upon the bond itself: each invented character, each excessive landscape, is contaminated by the inner state of the one who narrates. The imaginary is not neutral; it carries desire, resentment, manipulation. The story advances as pain persists, and the act of narration reveals itself as both care and violence.

The images — filmed in real locations, without digital artifice — establish a central paradox: the more grandiose the fantasy, the more fragile the ethical pact that sustains it becomes. Tarsem’s cinema does not pursue perfect illusion, but the fracture between the one who tells and the one who believes. The child listens, but also intervenes; she corrects the story, resists its darkening tone, reinscribing within it an intuitive ethics the adult has already lost.

After the screening, we propose an open conversation with the audience around the idea “Imagination as pact and risk,” reflecting on the responsibility of narrating, the use of the other as support for one’s own pain, and cinema as an intimate ritual in which fantasy does not automatically redeem — it merely postpones, displaces, or exposes the fall.