‹‹Insomnolências›› e notas de campo do filme ‹‹P’ra Irem P’ró Céu››

This article is a self-reflexive essay on the process of making the film “P’ra Irem P’ró Céu” (2013). Making use of text passages and images related to the author’s fieldwork, it discusses the possibilities and the significance of capturing the unseen. The process of construction of this “fiction” is analyzed by means of a return to the subjective experience of fieldwork, showing the centrality of the ritual of “Encomendação das Almas” for its everyday practitioners, giving expression to the implicit transcendental elements in the natural environment of each village and making visible the invisible upward movement of the souls from Purgatory to Heaven, intermingled with history and individual memory processes. Building a text or a film through the invisible is a way towards impurity: an anthropology of the visual negative to question the scientific and the relations constitutive for the films that we watch and make.