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In the opening shot of Ana Vaz’s feature debut, an intense blue descends upon the sprawling, modernist metropolis of Brasília, which starts spinning out of control as a symphony of wild animal sounds crescendos. It is night in America. A recognition, an alarm, an investigation, a lament…Vaz’s film sounds every one of these notes and then some, within rather subtle boundaries, such as the limited exposure and contrast range of an expired 16mm film stock, along with “day for night” shooting techniques that fabricate a permanent twilight. Through patient and attentive observation, Vaz documents the reduced territory of Brasília’s native animals, losing their habitats to an ever-encroaching human population. Between the sounds of machines, the animal and insect chorus and Guilherme Vaz’s portending composition are the voices of police, veterinarians and animal rescuers answering calls from people who no longer know the wildlife now entering their backyards or running across highways in a city designed for cars. Monkeys, anteaters, foxes, snakes, capybaras, giant otters, owls and other creatures present a growing refugee population, captive and vulnerable. Periodically punctuated by the long, direct gaze of the owl, this film—which also exists as a three-channel gallery installation—invites viewers to not only witness this ominous, delicate dance between wilderness and civilization, but experience it with decolonized eyes.
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.