"Like many others of my generation, I dreamed of making Brazil into a utopia..." says journalist and filmmaker Lúcia Murat. Like many others of her generation, Murat was arrested and tortured for her political activism during the military dictatorship of the 1960s. After a long period of silence and denial, today it is the chic thing to talk about the torture-the fact of it, that is, but not the experience of it. So Lúcia Murat's extraordinary film is decidedly un-chic; in it, eight former political prisoners, all women, speak frankly about their months and years in prison. Moreover, they articulate the price of surviving an experience that even their friends, husbands and children wish to cushion in silence. Today these women are activists, university professors, mothers, committed in every way to life. But privately each still struggles to recoup what the torturer took, what one woman calls "the pleasure of thinking." Murat intersperses the interviews with a fictional monolog performed by the actress Irene Ravache. Her anger may be a little too ironic, her irony a little too easy beside the profound humanity of these women whose lives are perforce unscripted. For them, surviving the torture is a lifelong project with paradoxes built in: "On the one hand, you pretend nothing happened; on the other hand, you pretend you didn't survive." -- Judy Bloch