Leonardo Pirondi

“Breaking Myths” aims to open the world’s eyes to the fragile and “catastrophic masculinity” of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro, a fanatical far-right politician who can best be described as the Brazilian Donald Trump. The story is told through the lens of the critically acclaimed Brazilian filmmaker and LGBTQ activist Fernando Grostein Andrade (“Abe” Sundance 19), who directed, wrote, and produced the feature alongside creative partner Fernando Siqueira as the first release under his production company in California, Cosmic Dog Studios.

On an interstellar journey, a group of scientists studies the last living vestiges of Earth. The artificial intelligence, Museo, becomes a portal to the crew’s diaries and a fragmented archive of humanity. On Earth, the one believed to be the last of the humans traverses a ruined planet that is slowly recovering, little by little, from the apocalypse it endured.

The great voyages to the "New World" were seen as expanding the frontiers of the visible and displacing those of the invisible, therefore maps from that time render the real and imaginary. The film follows a voyage of the Brazilian Military in search of an imaginary island with the same name as their country. In the myth from 1483 Brazil, or Hy-Brazil, is known to exist to the west of Ireland and above the Fortunate Islands. Visão do Paraíso is an examination of the capacity of the human imagination and computer simulations to construct environments. Amidst the fine threshold of the real, simulated, and imagined, the film analyzes the contemporary ideas of virtual reality and their ambition to expand the frontiers of the physical world into a "New World".

A cave named 'Gruta de las Pesadillas' was known to be a place whereby entering the cave with a torch or lamp, you would see your darkest nightmares reflected onto the shiny minerals from the inside. I was given access to a written document describing the experience of a man at the cave in 1914. He writes about leaving his house, going to the cave, and his experience there—This film is a visual and sonic recreation of the described event.

Dr. Eva Ray is 90 years old. She lives in a house by herself outside of Philadelphia. Born in former Yugoslavia, her family fled the Nazis and settled in New York. As a biochemist she worked for NASA and retired in her late 50's. She got divorced after 40 years of marriage and spent her time volunteering in local politics. After many years of independence and freedom, she now feels a deep sense of restlessness and finds herself at a significant turning point. Weaving through her memory and her present, she asks herself what she will do next in what she calls her "final chapter."

A film that explores the intersection of a virtual and analog image. Through the hand-processed 16mm and 3D simulation, the film questions what remains.

iPhone video and SMPTE color bars were filmed on 16mm at 24fps. The digital overscan of the celluloid is played back at 0.24fps (1% of the original speed). The film is a sequence of 15-second shots in which the computer creates hundreds of frames sampling from three frames. It chooses how to build natural forms out of one of the standard test patterns of NTSC video created by The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.

This pseudo diary film is made of found materials from an unfinished 16mm film. Potenciais à Deriva is a film started by a Brazilian artist under a pseudonym while living in exile in Los Angeles, California. Isolated shots and previously assembled scenes reveal an intention to create a mysterious film comprised of disembodied interviews, empty rooms, radio recordings, soccer games, and sudden apparitions of the filmmaker that slowly ruminates on Brazil's colonial past, North American Imperialism and the military dictatorship of the time in a paranoid and anxious manner. Be aware that the film's final version never came to exist. This version presented is my mere attempt to produce a film with these otherwise lost images.