
Mothership Goes to Brasil
Mothership Goes to Brasil
27 min., 2016
Josefin Arnell
The characters in Josefin Arnell’s videos are generally of an unrestrained nature: three young women linked together by a chain through their labia, communicating with an iceberg; a dancer encased in a hazmat suit trying to become one with a group of deer; someone with a serious pony fetish. Seen in this context, a middle-aged Swedish blond smoking, cursing and coughing is a positively ordinary character. Except that the woman in question is Arnell’s mother, and she is struggling with alcoholism and a serious illness. The filmmaker persuades her to travel to Brazil to seek salvation from the famous alternative healer John of God (who later would be accused in one of the biggest sexual scandals in Brazil and imprisoned for 19 years), but when they arrive, it turns out the miracle worker has been hospitalised. Instead of pain relief, the mother and daughter get a chance to become closer to one another.