Work­ing to the rhythm of the aisles of a banal super­mar­ket, the employ­ees seem seized by the repet­i­tive tasks and their rou­tine. There is the team from the bakery sec­tion who kneads, assem­bles, and bakes bread and cakes. There are the women and men who pile boxes on the stalls or the employ­ees who keep an eye on each cus­tomer through the secu­ri­ty screens… Day after day, all the work­ers in this Brazil­ian super­mar­ket keep pace with this rig­or­ous­ly orches­trat­ed ballet. Through the lens of her camera, Tali Yankele­vich observes this place, from an unusu­al angle, and then anoth­er unknown, strange and mar­vel­lous dimen­sion emerges. Dec­la­ra­tions of love, quan­tum mechan­ics, role play­ing in cos­tume and lit­er­ary dis­cus­sions pop­u­late the extra­or­di­nary sto­ries of MY DARLING SUPERMARKET. By reveal­ing the human­i­ty at the heart of the famil­iar place, in which we rarely show much inter­est, the super­mar­ket becomes a fine metaphor for talk­ing about the neces­si­ty of imag­i­na­tion in every­day life. And what if the mean­ing of our lives could be revealed in the aisles of a super­mar­ket? (Made­line Robert, Visions du Réel)

Tali Yankele­vich grew up in São Paulo and moved to the UK in 2005 to study film­mak­ing at the Edin­burgh Col­lege of Art. The shorts she direct­ed as a stu­dent were screend at renowned inter­na­tion­al fes­ti­vals such as Sil­ver­docs, Visions du Reel and others. Her first comis­sioned short doc­u­men­tary THE PERFECT FIT (2011, 9 min) was devel­oped through the Scot­tish Doc­u­men­tary Institute’s scheme, Bridg­ing the Gap. The film won an award at SXSW in 2012 as well as being short­list­ed for an Oscar nom­i­na­tion in 2013, for best doc­u­men­tary short sub­ject. Back in Brazil, Tali direct­ed the short film ‘A Gilr’s Day’ for the inter­na­tion­al series ‘Why Pover­ty?’. MY DARLING SUPERMARKET was sup­port­ed by IDFA Bertha Fund and is her first doc­u­men­tary fea­ture film.

Direc­tor, script: Tali Yankelevich
Cin­e­matog­ra­phy: Gus­ta­vo Almeida
Script, edit­ing: Marco Korodi
Script advi­sor: Victor Kossakovsky
Com­pos­er: André de Cillo, Alex Buck
Sound­de­sign: INPUT | artesonora
Pro­duc­tion: Casa Redonda
Dis­tri­b­u­tion: Elo Com­pa­ny, São Paolo luisa.graca@elocompany.com