QUANDO KÁTIA CONHECEU AUGUSTA
SHORT-FILM (SPAIN/ brazil)
sYNOPSIS
During Easter 1999, in a small Brazilian town, 12-year-old Kátia prepares for yet another attempt at her First Communion, after a string of tragicomic failures. Determined to please her parents, she strives to follow every rule. But the more obedient she becomes, the further she strays from herself — until something wild and true begins to stir inside.
STARRING Bruna Ribeiro & Tainá Bizarri
WRITTEN & DIRECTED BY Lud Mônaco
PRODUCED BY Mamma Roma Films
IN COPRODUCTION WITH La Casa per la Taulada
STATUS National Premiere at the 30th Zaragoza Film Festival (November 2025)
YEAR / LENGHT 2025/ 17 min
CINEMATOGRAPHY Carles F. Galí
GENRE Dramedy/ Coming-of-age
BUDGET 40.000€
THE AUTHOR’S STATEMENT
Set during the late ’90s — a world of vivid colours, pop ballads, plastic sandals and Catholic ritual — the film explores a childhood shaped by silence and the longing to belong. Kátia strives to be the perfect daughter, the perfect girl, the perfect believer. But the more she conforms, the further she drifts from herself. Augusta, at first an imaginary companion, embodies the opposite force: instinct, rebellion, the untamed self that refuses to be quiet. When she appears in real life, their meeting becomes something deeper than friendship — an interior collision between obedience and awakening.
Though shot in Spain, the film breathes Brazil — its language, its textures, its contradictions. These layers of displacement mirror my
path as a filmmaker navigating identity, memory, and the spaces where cultures overlap. Above all, this is a story about liberation: from inherited guilt, from rigid beliefs, from the scripts written for us before we are old enough to question them.
Making this film on my own terms became its own rite of passage — a kind of personal First Communion. Not an offering to tradition, but to freedom.
Lud Mônaco
Branded Cinema
