Fire Flower

In Brasília, the modern capital of Brazil, an anteater is found dead by the side of a road, a boa constrictor wanders across the suburbs, and foxes prowl vacant streets. Meanwhile, in the city zoo—home to hundreds of displaced and rescued wild species—the animals look back at us humans.

In a spellbinding, textural blend of 16mm and HD video, Ana Vaz refracts the colonial history of Brazil and Portugal through objects, gestures, and contemporary customs.

A voyage into the far west of Brazil leads us to a monumental structure - petrified at the centre of the savannah. Inspired by the epic construction of the city of Brasília, the film uses this history to imagine it otherwise. "I look at Brasília the way I look at Rome : Brasília began with a final simplification of ruins". Through the geological traces that lead us to this fictive monument, the film unearths a history of exploration, prophecy and myth.

Apiyemiyekî? addresses the genocide of the Waimiri-Atroari people in 1970s, when during the Brazilian dictatorship indigenous lands in the mid-west were invaded for the construction of the national road BR-174 and the installation of a mining company. Illustrations about the period, created by the indigenous population, including children, reveal a traumatic history, referring us to the present day.

Made for Somewhere From Here to Heaven, exhibition at Askuna Zentroa, Bilbao.

A meditation and a reverie upon a city at once real and imagined. Conceptualized as a documentary on the ZUP buildings in France, the film has instead found form as poetic & expansive confrontation with the psychogeography of a contemporary Europe in crisis. A requiem for a city dreamt between its past and present.

Defying gravity, a game of levitation becomes at once the possibility of magic; or a translation of an irrepressible desire for mastery.

Pseudosphinx is the scientific name of the fire-caterpillars soon to become butterfies, or as they're commonly (and auspiciously) called: witches. These butterfy-witches are associated with several myths. Pseudosphinx is at the same time sphinx, meaning inhuman chtonic monstrosity that spells charades; and pseudo, as in artificial, insincere, deceptive, unreal, illusive, mimetic. Pseudosphynx keeps its meaning veiled, like a secret kept by those who save in their retinas the haptic impression of its fight. [Punto de Vista]

Sacris Pulso departs from the dismemberment of another film, "Brasiliários". This film is an interpretation of Clarice Lispector's chronic "Brasília", her vision of the modernist capital, as it is the film which marks the encounter of my mother, playing Lispector, and my father, composer of the film's sound score. Through the juxtaposition of "Brasiliários" with a series of reassembled found footage, the film takes the form of a voyage of remembrance and imagination, of a past and future time dreamt between personal and collected materials, between memory and fiction.

"Há terra! is an encounter, a hunt, a diachronic tale of looking and becoming. As in a game, as in a chase, the film errs between character and land, land and character, predator and prey."

Fields of newborn flowers, small gatherings of surviving bees, resistant plant species and new types of eggs lay upon our shore, engaging us to dig and search for the meaning of such unexpected life...

Based on Gertrude Stein’s eponymously named screenplay, written in 1929 as European fascism was building momentum. Beatrice Gibson’s adaptation, set almost a century later in contemporary Paris, deploys Stein’s script as a talismanic guide through a contemporary moment of comparable social and political unrest. An original soundtrack, written especially for the film by British composer Laurence Crane, responds to the repetition, duplication and duality at play in Stein’s script. Both a fictional thriller and an act of collective representation, Deux Soeurs proposes empathy and friendship as means to reckon with an increasingly turbulent present.

The ecologic crisis is a political, economic and social crisis. It is also cinematographic, as cinema coincides historically and in a critical and descriptive way with the development of the Anthropocene. A Film, Reclaimed is a conversation, an essay that reads the terrestrial crisis under the influence and with the help of the beautiful and terrible films which have accompanied it.

Taking its title from the poem by Wallace Stevens, the film is composed of a series of attempts at looking and being looked at. Beginning as a city state commission under the name and attitude of “Unschool”, the film became a kaleidoscope of the experiences, questions and wonders of a couple of high school students after a year of experiences with filmmaker Ana Vaz questioning what cinema can be. Here, the camera becomes an instrument of inquiry, a pencil, a song.

For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment. Could cinema be an art of embodiment? By what rituals and actions could vision become tactile?