“Nise, the heart of madness”: Female representations in a film about occupational therapy

Abstract

Introduction: This article integrates a more comprehensive research on the representations of women in contemporary Latin American films, shown in the cinema, in order to identify possibilities of female empowerment. The film analyzed in this article is Nise - the heart of madness, which focuses on the work begun in the 1940s by Nise da Silveira in a psychiatric hospital in Rio de Janeiro. Objective: The purpose of this text is to analyze how the protagonist of this film is represented. In this process, were considered the sociocultural contexts, the identity markers and the conflicts that constitute the character Nise; the links it establishes with the men in the film, and the possibilities for women’s empowerment. Method: The methodology had a qualitative approach and involved three strategies: bibliographic research, film analysis and interviews, which contributed to understand how the public assimilates the female characters. Results: The results showed that Nise was portrayed in the film as an empowered woman and professional who did not accept violent mental treatments. She has developed groundbreaking work with her small team, transforming an abandoned therapeutic space into an art studio for internees. Conclusion: Nise inaugurates an occupational therapy that contrasts with the pragmatic and inhuman psychiatry of the time when using the language of art to discover the human being with his expressive narratives and articulated in networks. She resisted every form of oppression imposed by her colleagues and fought for the human and libertarian right of both women and those considered insane.