24/05/2023 - CANNES 2023: The first feature by Brazilian director Lillah Halla is a vibrant, sweaty mashup of underdog sports flick and arthouse abortion drama

With the preconceptions we might have on reproductive rights across developed countries, it’s perhaps a surprise to learn that abortion in Brazil is illegal and carries harsh penalties. Public opinion on the matter is also slanted towards criminalisation, not helped by the country’s strong evangelical revival, well referenced in this year’s excellent Cannes Special Screenings doc Pictures of Ghosts, which muses on all the beautiful independent cinemas in the country bought out and converted into churches. So, whilst seemingly familiar on the surface, Power Alley [+see also:
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There are dual plot strands that intersect fairly well: Sofia (Domenica Dias), a 17-year-old of Afro-Brazilian descent, plays for the youth Capão Leste women’s volleyball team (named for their area in São Paolo), where she’s being seriously considered for a life-changing sports scholarship in Chile. Soon discovering she is pregnant, by a person she shrugs off emotionlessly as a “motorcycle dude”, she begins researching termination options, which are limited to private women’s health facilities whose less-publicised function is to dissuade women from abortion. With the process beginning with a scan to see the living foetus in utero, parallels with conservative areas of the United States are uncanny in Halla’s depiction, and the doctor’s and nurse’s whiteness (as well as that of other aggressive characters later on in the story) is also associated with threats and social coercion. Any sense of hope is realistically deferred, as the screenplay (co-written by María Elena Morán) follows Sofia and her beekeeper father João (Rômulo Braga) assessing a Uruguayan clinic as an option, due to the ancestry of her dead mother. There’s also the clandestine route of illegally acquiring the Misoprostol drug used in their treatment, but this is fraught with danger and potentially implicates those assisting her, in light of the country’s harsh penal system.

As said, this highly goal-orientated plot line, overlapping with the likes of recent movies Happening [+see also:
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interview: Anamaria Vartolomei
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film profile], merges productively with the volleyball tournament she’s involved in, providing another ticking clock and a sense of nervous anticipation. The context of the team environment being a highly queer space, complete with trans and non-binary players (a sign in their dressing room is scribbled over with the pronoun “they”), gives the notion of overcoming an unwanted pregnancy a unique charge: with a far-right, Bolsonaroist group catching wind of her situation as neighbourhood gossip circulates, the team evokes a cocoon of feminine strength, providing mutual defence for a polymorphous array of gender-specific issues. And connected to its inventive use of music and artful chiaroscuro lighting, an ending of mainstream-friendly triumphalism in the sports tournament is averted as well, leaving this debut, although hamstrung slightly by its familiar “abortion drama” elements, as a mature, bittersweet first match on the court for Halla.

Power Alley is a production by Brazil, Uruguay and France, staged by Arissas, Manjericão Filmes, Cimarrón Cine and In Vivo Films. Its international sales are handled by m-appeal.