Led by the Ashes

Description

Bethânia and Laura reunite to locate their father, Seu Lauro, and to settle a family matter: they drive the roads of the Pernambuco hinterland in search of his body while dealing with fractured communication inside the family. The film presents that search directly—stops at roadside houses, conversations that start and cut off, and decisions about how to proceed with the remains—without resolving those choices on screen. Ao Sabor das Cinzas (Led by the Ashes), released in 2026, frames those actions within a drama with fantastical elements; the cast includes Veronica Cavalcanti and Everaldo Pontes, alongside Guilherme Milleron and Isadora Gibson. A second strand runs concurrently in the sisters’ home: Bethânia’s daughter assembles and edits a video that overlays images and audio from family life with material that evokes the dead, producing sequences where recorded speech and live presence intersect and disclose withheld details. That edited footage operates as an independent narrative thread—played back, paused, and re-cut—so the film alternates between the bodily search on the road and the editing work at home, letting the two streams reveal different factual traces of what happened to Seu Lauro.