Goats

THE PEOPLE

Tara Heise, an Afro-German artist in her late 30s, struggles with the everyday humiliations of racism in Berlin – while apartment hunting, in the arts scene, on the street. Her art, installations exploring identity and repression, goes largely unnoticed. When her last relative dies, she inherits a run-down farm in Pomerode, a region in southern Brazil shaped by 19th-century German immigrants that still celebrates a nostalgically sanitized "Germanness."*

For Tara, the farm is the longed-for escape from German circumstances. But her arrival in the timber-frame idyll comes as a shock: The white, conservative village community has no interest in a Black German woman disrupting their homogeneous worldview. To the locals, she is "the German" – but not the right kind. The everyday racism she knew in Berlin confronts her here in a new, absurd form.

Tara finds herself caught between all fronts: The local patriarch, a German-descended large-scale farmer, sees her as a threat to his authority and tries to drive her away. Her Brazilian cousin, meanwhile, hopes for a wealthy heiress from Europe and plans to use the farm for illegal marijuana cultivation. When Tara refuses, the seeming idyll becomes a nightmare. She realizes that drug cultivation in Brazil is no minor offense but embroils her in a war marked by racism and corruption – and that the patterns of exclusion she fled recur here in grotesque form.

At the center of the conflict stands, of all things, a valuable billy goat named Wotan – symbol of a idealized Germanness and simultaneously a bone of contention between the opposing sides. As Tara comes to understand that she doesn't have to choose between worlds but can define her own, she begins to work the farm on her terms – and confronts the fight for her identity, her inheritance, and her life.

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