Melancholy and discomfort in A Gis: archives of Gisberta Salce's memory

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of the film A Gis (Thiago Carvalhaes, 2017), dedicated to Gisberta Salce, a Brazilian transgender woman who was brutally murdered in Portugal in 2006. Drawing on official documents, news reports, and emotional testimonies, the film creates a counter-archive gesture, confronting institutional records with intimate memories. The aim of this study is to understand how the work aesthetically mobilizes the affects of melancholy and discomfort, reinscribing Gisberta as a subject of memory. To this end, the article articulates the concepts of mourning and melancholia in Freud (2013), melancholy as collective historicity in Flatley (2008), queer discomfort in Ahmed (2013), and the pathologization of trans lives in Preciado (2023). The analysis shows that, in the film, melancholy is not restricted to an individual psychic state, but becomes a political force by denouncing processes of exclusion and erasure. Discomfort, in turn, manifests itself in the mismatch between the trans body and normative spaces, becoming a key to interpreting the familial, institutional, and social conflicts that permeate the narrative. The conclusion is that the film operates as an exercise in aesthetic and political resistance, reinscribing Gisberta in a shared mourning and transforming melancholy into a tool of memory and social critique