IT IS TIME TO RETURN
It’s Time to Return
A work-in-progress experimental film by Lola Lustosa
(Ritual Film, 2024–2026)
In a world already undone, the sacred feminine returns—bare and burning through time, myth, and stone. A poetic resistance in motion, reclaiming the naked body as memory, presence, and revolt.
Lola’s current film “It’s Time to Return” is a work-in-progress: a non-linear, intuitive film-ritual that explores mythopoetic embodiment, ancestral resonance, and metaphysical time.
Her video works are part of the film archive at TFM – Theater, Film and Media Studies at the University of Vienna, where they remain open to researchers and future generations of artists and students.
1.>> Introduction:
IT IS TIME TO RETURN
It’s time to return” is an independent film directed, acted, shot and produced by Lola Lustosa. The film presents dreams, rituals, efforts, mind Settings, time and space, in constant transformation and connected from the starting point. It is the result of the documentation of a witchcraft series made by Lola Lustosa since 2016. So far, the film shooting has toured Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, Athens, Milos Island, Rome, Chapada dos Veadeiros, Paraty and Sidikauki. The artist was supported to start this film by artist and curator Serge Ivanov. Sadly, Ivanov disappeared on Papa Westray Island in early 2017 and there has been no news of him since. The project addresses questions such as: Is it possible to return to the one, to being without the unfolding of time? Is it possible to be completely outside the matrix? Can we live in a plural physical time and space and be aware, conscious of this existence? Is there an eternal reality? How do we perceive the plural dimensions?Are they measurable? Is disappearance possible? And the universe, is it possible for its becoming to be exhausted?
“She dreamed that she was a butterfly and did not know when she woke up whether she was a woman who had dreamed of being a butterfly or a butterfly who now dreamed of being a woman.” Chuang Tzu (300 a. (C)
3.>> Project description
I begin by attending to a strong intuition resonating in my body of memory – ancestral intuition copulating with the force of nature. This intuition leads me to a definite encounter, a fusion between nature and the human, split in modernity. From this perspective, I see myself as a woman, mother, single, artist / dancer / filmmaker / photojournalist … woman and I confess that many times during the process of making the images for this film, the perception of gender was not evident, fundamental is existence and how to maintain it on a daily basis, unlock myself from prejudice, hostility, criticism, trauma, fear, death, fear of man, of generations, of myself, of social modernity.
This film, when finished, will be an absurd promise of the promised and forgotten autonomy of the human being. But how to rescue this autonomy? In a first moment, the social instructions that by repetition, inertia, impose themselves on my movements / actions as a woman, as a human being, need to be suspended. The legitimacy of this condition is crucial: how to reestablish my primitive self without emancipating myself from the utilitarian? (of the constructed / semiotic).
These searches made me ask myself: who is this “one” in this moment when I isolate myself, in a solitary attempt to search for its truth? Many times during the filming I was completely alone, others with people around me, others with close friends or strangers holding the camera for me, no matter these consequences. What matters is the attentive listening to my intuition at every moment that this intuition challenges me. This reality made me come across how Schopenhauer responds to his own psychological crisis (described at the book “The Power of Myth” by Joseph Campbell). This listening sharpened my senses, represents the opening to a metaphysical consciousness that realizes you and the other are only one, that you are two aspects of a single life, and that your apparent separation is only the result
of the way we experience the forms forged under the constraints imposed in time and space. Our true reality lies in our identity and oneness with total life. This is a metaphysical truth that can arise spontaneously in circumstances of crisis. For this is, according to Schopenhauer, the truth of his life. I realize myself in this truth. And I experienced this philosophy in the process of capturing the images in this film.
I believe that the hero is the one who has surrendered the materiality of physical life. Believe that the hero is the one who offers his physical life in sharing some trait that helps him the special understanding of this truth that provokes me in different sensations, forms, images, sounds and materializations. The idea of loving one’s neighbor is to be in tune with this truth.
This listening in many moments beckoned me to forget, in others, possessed me in the past and in the myths of the location chosen for the shoot. In this shooting, I freed myself and let myself live all the impressions that presented themselves: Eve, Venus, Age of Aquarius, sounds of Tibetan gongs, mermaids, Sufi dances, sufferings, the goddess Iansã (the goddess of heavenly rays), insects, birds, whales. The choice for nudity is justified by a non-consent to the female figure in a given time and space. I have the inclination, or rather the duty, to provide opportunities for this collective identification.
The constant task of strengthening the human connection with nature and its particular forms of repetition (particular god, akasha…). Over time, I have come across objects or limitations imposed by man on his territory (elapsed time and territorial construction). I have been magnetized into a mirror, magnetized into a fence, forced to wear clothes, sometimes by social rules, sometimes by too much cold. There is a reason in every event. What was captured by the camera during the experience and by this timeless consciousness. Necessary is that the dream is ongoing and needs to be realized. Necessary is that the dream is in pursuit and needs to be completed. Let this love of life be documented and receive its best editing.
I have yet to shoot the element of fire, walk naked down an empty road, and talk to a giant (a puppet) in the undergrounds of Berlin. Now I port a bow and arrow. It is important to say that my intention is to bring beauty. To bring back human beauty in its natural, intellectual, emotional, constructive and per formative uniqueness. I notice that this encounter of images comes strongly close to the quid of the feminine condition that at the same time I try to move away in social discourses. The further I move away, the closer I get to this sacred woman.
I would like the feminine (the sacred feminine) to return to its imagetic position. That the naked woman be strengthened in her visual freedom, that I can express the simplicity that exists in this condition. Haunting. The myths haunted me throughout the process of capturing images for this film. Indistinctly. Wherever I was: in the meditative or psychological work I was doing to myself. I never intended a psychological control, accepting what is presented to me became an integral part in the construction of this “story”.
On the Role of the Body / Nudity in the Film
In “It’s Time to Return,” nudity is not a provocation, nor an aesthetic device. It is a spiritual and political gesture—part of a lived ritual. I appear naked in much of the film because I do not wish to claim any specific time, space, or identity. The absence of clothing is a refusal to be placed, labeled, or owned.
For me, being naked is a way of not belonging to any era, place, or construct. I am not dressed for a system, a gaze, or a chronology. I move through landscapes and myths with a body that listens rather than performs. This nudity allows the film to enter a space before the social—where body and earth meet without interference.
It is a return to a sacred, pre-coded state of being. It reflects a desire to be porous, intuitive, and free—to transform, to disappear, to reappear differently. In this way, the body becomes not an object, but a channel through which ancestral memory, myth, and healing pass.
“The choice for nudity is not aesthetic or erotic but ritualistic and symbolic. It is a refusal of imposed roles and a return to a sacred, pre-coded state of being. The body becomes an instrument of truth.”
In the future, I may no longer be able to reveal the precise locations where the film was made. The body, as it appears in these images, becomes something else—a timeless body, suspended between geographies and histories. Ironically, what began as an intuitive, poetic act may have grown into something stronger than I imagined—legally compromising, politically charged, and too free to name. For my own protection, I may be required to transform locations, obscure their names, or even claim that the scenes were staged or digitally altered. Perhaps I will have to say that I was never truly naked. And if things become too hot—if risk outweighs ritual—I may have no choice but to hide or even destroy the original footage. But the body knows. The body remembers. And what was offered in that moment cannot be undone.
THE WORK IS LOOKING FOR SPONSORS/ PARTNERS TO BE FINISHED
