Força em transe is a short sensory film that investigates trance as a contested form of knowledge in Brazilian religious context. Emerging from the filmmaker’s position - shaped by a white, rationalist, and Christianised imaginary that disciplines the body and privileges restraint - the project approaches Afro-indigenous religions not as an act of affiliation, but as an epistemological encounter that destabilises dominant modes of perception.

The film is structured through a central formal code: presence and absence as knowledge. Rather than offering explanatory narratives, it operates through fragmentation, interruption, and sensory tension. Sound frequently precedes or outlasts the image, while bodies appear in partial gestures - breath, tremor, touch, rhythm - foregrounding the body as an archive where memory, ancestry, and intelligence are transmitted beyond language.

Through the juxtaposition od Pentecostal Christian rituals and Umbanda and Candomblé manifestations, the film exposes how similar corporeal states are interpreted asymmetrically: legitimised as faith in some contexts, and disqualified as superstition or threat in others. This asymmetry is not located in trance itself, but in the bodies and epistemologies authorised to perform it.

Working exclusively with re-edited archival material, Força em Transe uses absence not as lack, but as a critical strategy - allowing the viewer to experience how historical erasure, moral regulation, and aesthetic sanitisation shape the perception of embodied knowledge. The film does not seek resolution; instead, it holds the viewer within this tension, privileging sensory experience as a mode of critical inquiry.