Arid Hearts

Uberlândia, Minas Gerais, Brazil, February 24th 2011. Isabel Burlan da Silva, the director’s mother, is brutally murdered by her partner. “Elegy of a Crime” is the final chapter of Cristiano Burlan’s “Mourning Trilogy, about the tragic family history. Faced with impunity, the film plunges into a dizzying journey to rebuild Isabel's image and life.

A street vendor who lives in the outskirts of São Paulo returns home at night and does not find her teenager son. After a nonstop search, she finds out the boy was killed by the police and his body is missing. This is the beginning of this woman’s vertiginous fight for the right to bury her son, a fight that will not only unveil the excessive violence of one of most lethal police forces of the world, but also how structural is racism in Brazilian society.

A projectionist at a porn cinema in downtown São Paulo, makes his first film in Super8, an essay about the failure of a lifetime. The scenes from the films you watched intersect with the new images they capture, fiction and reality blending together, weaving a bridge between the past and the present.

A Political Movie

The city of São Paulo in its continuous process of construction and deconstruction, seen from the microcosm of a construction site, its workers and as several machines in full activity.

Reconstructing the details of the death of his brother, Rafael Burlan da Silva, twelve years ago, the filmmaker Cristiano Burlan launches a personal journey that leads to the heart of a cycle of violence in the outskirts of São Paulo — like the neighborhood Capão Redondo, where his family lived and where his 22 year-old brother was killed with 7 shots in 2001. Exploring his brother’s reasons for involvement with drugs and car theft, the director exposes parts of his own family history, listening to relatives and friends, whose testimonies bring to light the fates of several characters, mapping the history of painful emotional wounds.

Jean feels trapped in the logic of longevity that the pharmaceutical industry imposes on him and decides to plan a conscious suicide. He invites Helena to commit suicide to two. She, on the other hand, hesitates, knows that she will live well even if she needs to live alone, but she helps him in his intentions. The silence between them does not reveal distance, but intimacy. These are years of shared affection. Together, they will prepare all the details for the funeral. He dances death while she continues rehearsing life. In the process, the two realize that before the end, there is still a lifetime.

At the eastern end of the city of São Paulo, poetry is a reality.

Between the light and the dark of the projection rooms, there is a professional little known by the cinema audience: the projectionist. Based on the microcosm of a projection room, the documentary records the routine of these workers, who have a long and lonely workday.

Plagued by the insomnia thoughts that leads one man to a dizzying journey into the night, he keeps wandering the paths of a metropolis on a path of no return. The man travels into a journey from the verb to the dust in the São Paulo night. The question is how to escape from this place that stroke and houses in the same time that dilacerate?

Documentary series in five episodes about the Brazilian thinker who is a world reference in education. Cristiano Burlan investigates the formation of Paulo Freire and his influences for the conception of Pedagogy of the Oppressed from testimonies of his family and professionals who knew him or work in the institutions where he put his concepts into practice.

Inspired by the masterpiece of concrete music "Symphony for one man" Pierre Henry (1950), the film tells the story of a common man leaving the interior of Brazil to try life in São Paulo. The city, in its perpetual process of construction and deconstruction view from the microcosm of a construction site, its workers and a profusion of machines in full swing. The metaphysical revolt of this character is the revolt against his condition and against everything that humiliates him.

Nosferatu arrives in a town escaping from Van Helsing. He brings not only his curse, but ghosts from his past. In this escape, he dives into a macabre dance searching for an actress and faces the horror of eternity and the pain of an endless existence.