Moara Passoni’s astonishing hybrid work of documentary, memoir and fiction, Êxtase, which has been making the festival rounds following a CPH:DOX premiere, arrives in the U.S. at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight. The film will be viewable online from March 28 until April 2 and is a feature debut for the director, who splits her time between her native Brazil and New York.

From my 25 New Face profile of Passoni last summer:

The hybrid work pulls from the director’s own diaries and interviews with other anorexics to capture the lived experience of anorexia, its social underpinnings and its use as an object of theory. “Mixing fiction and documentary enabled me to put the reality of the anorexic body against the often delirious abstraction of anorexia,” Passoni says. “I look at the intersection between sexuality and power, politics and subjectivity, and between those and the psyche. The film is an investigation of the mind as well as the body, and of what troubles both.” What she was intent on avoiding: “turning the anorexic body into spectacle.” About the collapsing formal boundaries of her work, Passoni paraphrases Godard (“The best documentary is closest to fiction”); about the role of philosophy, Cassavetes (“To have a philosophy is to know how to love and to know where to put it.”)

Needless to say, Êxtase gets a high recommendation. Check out the trailer above as well as Lauren Wissot’s interview with Passoni out of CPH:DOX.