Felipe Drehmer

Kbela is an experience of being a woman and becoming black. The film’s screenplay is based on the tale of MC K-Bela, which tells the story of a black girl, a resident of Rio’s Baixada Fluminense region, who went through a process of whitening during her life and decided to liberate herself from this, letting her natural hair grow again, getting rid of chemical interference.

A Brazilian development project, initiated during the military dictatorship in the 1970s, encouraged the “exploration” of northern Brazil by settlers from Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul. Based on a German-inspired festival held in Sinop, Mato Grosso, where an anonymous, fictional, and suspicious character wanders through forests and plantations, the narrative offers a free-form account of an immigration process that caused, and continues to cause, cultural, environmental, and political changes in a region once inhabited by diverse Indigenous peoples.