The Age of Stone

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

Yoko Hayasuke's journal is set in the wake of the tsunami and nuclear disaster after the Tōhoku earthquake. Something happened yet life goes on: Tokyo continues to expand, new soil replaces irradiated land.

"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."

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

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.

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]

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.

 “Look closely at the mountains!”: the phrase was coined by artist Manfredo de Souzanetto during Brazil’s years of dictatorhsip. Mining activities were destroying the environment in the state of Minas Gerais in the south west of the country. Through editing, Ana Vaz draws parallels between this region and the very distant Nord-Pas-de-Calais in northern France, also marked by over three centuries of mining. On one side, eroded mountains plague its inhabitants with deadly landslides. Hollow and gutted, these mountains become the receptacles of a ghostly memory. On the other side, in France, mining waste stacks become mountains and reservoirs of biodiversity, where the frontier between nature and technology is now indiscernible.

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?