Rita Macedo
Filmmaker, artist, and film programmer based in Berlin • Rita’s work fluidly traverses non-fiction, speculative narratives, and narrative disruption, exploring the unstable terrains of meaning and memory • Through a practice that resists fixed interpretation, the work investigates the shifting relationships between image, perception, and time • Artistic associate at the Braunschweig University of Art since 2018.
Rita’s work has been shown at numerous exhibitions and festivals, including, European Media Art Festival, Berwick Film and Media Art Festival, Hamburg Short Film Festival, IndieLisboa International Film Festival, Kasseler Dokfest, São Paulo International Short Film Festival, Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival, New Horizons International Film Festival, Curtas Vila do Conde, Encounters South Africa Documentary Film Festival, amongst others.
rita.macedo.inbox[at]gmail[dot]com
@rita_void
Non film in three acts and a prelude
Film • 12′ 30″ • sound (ST) • PT w/ EN subtitles • 2010
“Non-film in Three Acts and a Prelude” is a film that stages its own demise.
Shot entirely on Super8, the film presents a sequence of disjointed encounters in which speaking heads lose sense, dialogue undoes itself and dramaturgy becomes a problem rather than a guide.
Through surreal logic, recursive gestures, and formal sabotage, the film performs its own unraveling — refusing closure, character, or stable address. What emerges is a non-film that wrestles, mournfully and absurdly, with the boundaries of speech, representation, and the act of making meaning.
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
“Non-film in Three Acts and a Prelude” enacts a critical engagement with cinematic structure from within its most familiar coordinates. Framed around the recognizable architecture of a classical play, the film introduces a narrative grid—three acts and a prelude—only to steadily erode itself. While maintaining an overall formal consistency, each section bends the conventions of voice, image, and character just enough to disorient: narration breaks apart mid-sentence, speech overlaps itself, and figures resist narrative continuity. The work’s internal language is one of contradiction—restless and formally unruly.
The film draws on traditions of performative absurdism and experimental cinema but maintains a distance from both. It neither satirizes nor venerates its own form. Instead, it oscillates between earnest address and conceptual deflation, tearing at the very expectations it initially sets. The Super8 materiality functions not only as texture but as residue—suggesting temporal distance and mechanical fragility.
“Non-film” functions less as a narrative than as a rehearsal: of failed meaning, broken speech, and incompatible registers of expression. Its refusal to resolve or stabilize does not point toward nihilism, but toward a generative discomfort—an opening through which dissonant modes of making and viewing might surface.
Written, directed and edited by Rita Macedo • Camera Stefan Butzmühlen, Rita Macedo • Cinematography Stefan Butzmühlen, Vika Kirchenbauer, Stefan Neuberger • Sound Capture Manuel Vogt, Rob Santaguida, Vika Kirchenbauer • Sound design Rita Macedo