IMS, Equipe. Clarice's Days in Washington. IMS Clarice Lispector, 2024. Disponível em: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2024/09/10/clarices-days-in-washington/. Acesso em: 27 April 2026.
Since 2015, the Literature team at the Moreira Salles Institute has been producing audiovisual material about the life and work of Clarice Lispector. The film Dias de Clarice em Washington [Clarice’s Days in Washington] (28:38) is part of this research and dissemination effort. In this latest work, you will find entirely unpublished images in film and photography.
Until then, we had only two filmed records of the author: the famous interview for TV Cultura (1977) and rare images of the writer at her apartment, in the Leme neighborhood, also during an interview, for the TVE program Os mágicos [The Magicians] (1976), the latter incorporated into Clarice Lispector – A descoberta do mundo [Clarice Lispector – The Discovery of the World] (2022), a film by the director Taciana Oliveira. Both recordings were aired on television and produced in similar periods (the author of The Hour of the Star died in December 1977).
Dias de Clarice em Washington captures a very different and decisive moment in the life and work of the writer, when she lived in the American capital with her family, between 1952 and 1959. In addition to a significant number of unpublished photographs – which record her domestic environment and interactions with friends – there are precious images filmed during a public event, in which the writer, her husband Maury Gurgel Valente, their son Paulo, in addition to friends of the couple appear. It concerns a brief color video (06:59) that was recorded on film (by an unknown author) and discovered in 2023 at the Center for Research and Documentation on Contemporary Brazilian History (CPDOC), which is part of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV) in Rio de Janeiro.
Dias de Clarice em Washington was directed by Eucanaã Ferraz, the Literature Consultant at the IMS. The editing was done by Laura Liuzzi and the research was conducted by Bruno Cosentino, who is part of the IMS Literature team.
See also
by Betty Bernardo Fuks
Benjamin Moser, one of the most significant biographers of Clarice Lispector, said in an interview that one of his goals in writing Why This World, published in the United States and translated into Portuguese as Clarice, uma biografia, was to make space for a theme rarely explored by literary critics, commentators, and biographers: the writer’s “Judeity.” Most tend to limit themselves to reflecting on her “Brazilianness,” “as if one had to choose between being Jewish and being Brazilian.”
by Equipe IMS
In the 2025 edition of Clarice’s Hour, we will celebrate, through the voices and presentations of kids, the children's story “Laura’s Intimate Life,” published as a book by Clarice Lispector in 1974. In this film, six children retell, act, illustrate, and co-direct the story of Laura the hen, her husband Luís, and their son Hermany in Dona Luísa's henhouse.
by Equipe IMS
The Brazil LAB is an interdisciplinary initiative at Princeton University that considers Brazil to be a crucial nexus for us to understand today’s most pressing issues. Based at PIIRS (Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies), the LAB brings together professors, researchers, and students from more than 20 different university departments (from the social to the natural sciences, from engineering to the arts and humanities) in interaction with dozens of researchers from academic institutions of excellence.
by Victor Heringer
The Chandelier, Clarice Lispector’s second novel, published in 1946, was just translated into English by Benjamin Moser and Magdalena Edwards.
by Antonio Ladeira
[...] throughout all of Clarice’s work there is a dazzling – almost primordial, inaugural, Edenic – vision of gender, of the man-woman division. One notes a frightened fascination that there is a male-animal-man in the world, as we read, for example, in the short story “The Buffalo,” and also in another story about phantasmic and monstrous masculinity titled “The Dinner”.
by Equipe IMS
The film portrays the famous Ulisses, Clarice Lispector’s dog and a prominent character in her life and fiction. He is present in the posthumous novel A Breath of Life, he is the narrator of the children’s book Quase de verdade (Almost True), he was mentioned in countless chronicles, and today he is immortalized, alongside his owner, in a bronze statue at Leme Beach, in Rio de Janeiro.
