Captain Gervasio’s Family was filmed in locations across Brazil but centers on Palmelo, a small town in Goiás. Half of its 2,000 residents are psychic mediums, many of whom work day jobs as civil servants and teachers as well as partaking in daily rituals of psychic healing. For them, spirits intervene in, teach, and transform the material world, and they practice what is known as “the magnetic chain,” a legacy of Franz Mesmer’s theory of “animal magnetism” adapted by the nineteenth-century spiritist Alan Kardec. This chain is used to treat illnesses, including psychiatric illnesses, and Palmelo’s foundation in 1929—by the titular Captain Gervasio—was also the foundation of its sanatorium.
The film refers to a map drawn by a Palmelo spiritist charting twenty astral cities hovering above Brazilian soil. Cities like those on earth, but infinitely more perfect, in which the recently deceased learn and work. Scenes from Palmelo are intercut with architectural shots of other Brazilian cities, near and far. This montage suggests cities projected from the body of the medium, like ectoplasm. These cities are splendid visions of modernity where governors, ministers, and endless secretaries are viewed as benign agents of infinite wisdom. The film treats these not as urban fantasies but as signs of a radical communal project, hidden in plain sight: a communal effort of psychic rescuing.
