The cityscape of Brasília: a clogging of industry, automobiles and endless looping paved roads and highways. Occasionally a displaced wild animal, be it a monkey or an ant eater, scampers across a street. The unlucky will be casualties on the road, and the lucky will end up in a zoo. In her striking debut feature, filmmaker Ana Vaz weaves a mesmerising, poetic odyssey exploring the contamination of urban expansion on the natural world.
Shot on grainy 16mm, a format itself looming towards extinction, Vaz’s feature frames the landscape in the day-for-night wet blues of an endless twilight. Incorporating the eeriness of eco-horror with the ethnographic nature of a documentary, as the animals peering back at us from their cages and enclosures morph into a dizzying, poignant symbol of colonial displacement. A haunting, almost militarised score by the late legendary composer Guilherme Vaz propels us through this deeply textured and memorable meditation.
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