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The screenings are part of the Harvard Film Archive Film Series EXCAVATING SUBTERRANEA. THE FILM POEMS OF ANA VAZ
Apiyemiyekî? Directed by Ana Vaz. Brazil/France/Portugal/Netherlands, 2019, DCP, color and b&w, 27 min. DCP source: Lightcone
Amazing Fantasy. Directed by Ana Vaz. France/Japan, 2018, DCP, color, 3 min. DCP source: Lightcone
There Is Land! (Há terra!). Directed by Ana Vaz. Brazil/France, 2016, DCP, color, 13 min. Portuguese with English subtitles. DCP source: Lightcone
Atomic Garden. Directed by Ana Vaz. Brazil/Portugal, 2018, DCP, color, 8 min. DCP source: Lightcone
The Tree (A árvore). Directed by Ana Vaz. Brazil/Spain, 2022, DCP, color, 21 min. Portuguese with English subtitles. DCP source: filmmaker
Speaker: Ana Vaz, Filmmaker. Born in Brasília in 1986, Ana Vaz has studied, lived and ventured around the world—including France and Australia—and since returned to this critical location, the setting of many of her films. Through a kind of interrogation and recomposition, the experimental filmmaker helps us to remember what the modernist phenomenon of Brasília attempted to erase, a decimation that has also taken place and takes place in different forms, in different places, as if the original wilderness and its inhabitants had never existed. Brasília’s creation involved a unique kind of erasure, its vision of utopia a contradictory negation of life. In her own words, Vaz is “excavating the layers underneath this architecture, trying to reconnect with a subterranean dimension of this place.” Working with the organic alchemy of 16mm for her initial image capture, Vaz mentions the possibilities of the camera “dehumanizing our vision a little bit,” not in the alienating sense, but in the sense of expanding and changing the perspective to experience things without as much learned interference, a kind of sensory decolonization. She asks us to “remember that cinema is not consumption: it is perception, transformation of perception, it is time and space.” Her films often exist in such a multidimensional state, aided by either making visible the invisible, or by pointing to the masks and illusions created to silence myriad voices that know better.
Director in Person. $15 Special Event Tickets.
This event will be in Portuguese with English Translation.
Co-sponsored with the Harvard Film Archive.