Isabella (or The Society of Spectacle)

Brazil has recently witnessed one of the most extraordinary cases of overreaction by mass media.

It is all about little Isabella Nardoni, a 5 years old girl thrown from the 5th floor of a building in North São Paulo.

An accident? Simple murder?

It could be so, but the fact is that evidences made the Police, the media, and, consequently, the general public to believe that Isabella’s father and her stepmother would be the actual killers.

What followed was a massive commotion and the exhaustive exposition of such facts by newspapers, magazines and TV shows. Something like Madeleine McCann’s case, the British girl kidnapped in Portugal in 2007, started all over Brazil.

What we are trying to do here, with this multimedia piece, is to bring a fresh look over the media coverage of massive cases that develop into a certain amount of sensationalism.

The soundtrack is Electric Counterpoint Fast, by Steve Reich.