Film Session 3: Cinematic Methodologies

This session underlines Vaz’s genuine interest in the craft of filming: what is it that comes prior to the creation of an image and how an image can be built to reverberate. Is it through a film diary? A collective immersion? A political manifesto? In different ways, she approaches specific topics while ruminating on her practice with her father and long-time collaborator in The Tree (2022); alongside young students in 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (2020); and dialoguing with images crafted by other artists in A Film, Reclaimed (2015). In shifting film methodologies, materialities and textures, attempts are free just as in her cinema.

The screening will be followed by an in-person Q&A with Ana Vaz.

The Tree (Brazil/Spain, 2022, 21’)

In 2018, Ana Vaz decided to start a film diary. After years of a “constant exercise of projection and representation”, she wanted to explore “everything that usually remains on the sidelines”, in her own words. A conversation between the filmmaker and her father - the great Brazilian composer Guilherme Vaz (1948-2018) - is the guide for a geographical journey composed of words, images and wind whisperings.

13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (Portugal, co-elaborated with students Vera Amaral and Mário Neto, 2020, 31’)

What are images? Do images just appear? How to place them? These are some of the questions that come up in 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, a title borrowed from the poem by Wallace Stevens. Inventive and metalinguistic, the film is a collective reflection elaborated by Ana Vaz and high schoolers Vera Amaral and Mário Neto on what cinema can be. “The film is a song you can see”, one of the definitions that arises on screen may lead the way.

A Film, Reclaimed (France, a collaboration with Tristan Bera, 2015, 20’)

In her most overtly political act, Vaz collaborates with Tristan Bera in this manifesto dedicated to the ecologic crisis. Released almost a decade ago, A Film, Reclaimed is more pressing than ever as we are living on a collapsing planet. Resorting to a collage of images produced by artists such as Katherine Bigelow, Stanley Kubrick and Werner Herzog, this is an essay about the end of the world - or the beginning of another.

Film Session 4: Human/Nonhuman

Nature plays a central role in Vaz’s cinema. It is constantly confronted by the notion of artificiality, prompted by a conscious use of sound and editing style. Her ability to forge (psycho)geographies results in new imagery and storytelling. Figures of animals on screen, for instance, are more than a mere representation: they look back at the audience, provoking an unusual sensation. From aunts on the ground to flying birds in the sky, wildlife is a reminder that human beings are not alone on this planet.

Atomic Garden (France/Japan, 2018, 8’)

Fukushima, Japan. Firework flowers flouring on the screen. Bees and butterflies flying between the colourful day and the darkness of the night sky. In this stroboscopic tale, Vaz presents images of transmutation, survival and resilience in the face of toxicity through Aoki Sadako’s flowering garden.

Pseudosphynx (Brazil, 2020, 8’)

During the Inquisition in the Middle Ages, it was believed that witches turned into butterflies. Pseudosphynx is the scientific name of the fire caterpillars soon to become butterflies - commonly known as witches. Pseudosphynx, therefore, is also a story of transformation, caught between curse and liberation. An enigma.

It is Night in America (Brazil/Italy/France, 2022, 41')

In her first feature film, Vaz meditates on the collision of two seemingly opposing worlds: the wildlife surrounding Brasília and life in Brasília as the real wildness. Filmed at Brasília Zoo, we witness rescued species like giant anteaters, maned wolves, wood foxes, and capybaras meet with biologists, veterinarians, caretakers and the environmental police. “Midnight blue. The creatures return to the city. They nest in the parking lots. They glorify the inhabitants' garbage in a nocturnal feast that escapes the tyranny of the sun, the monuments, the roads, and the edifications. The animalistic spell cast against the empire of death in the dead of the American night: time that turns day into night”, she poetically puts it.