Ana Vaz

Atomic Garden

Ana Vaz

Fields of newborn flowers, small gatherings of surviving bees, resistant plant species and new types of eggs lay upon our shore, engaging us to dig and search for the meaning of such unexpected life...

Apiyemiyekî?

Ana Vaz

Apiyemiyekî? addresses the genocide of the Waimiri-Atroari people in 1970s, when during the Brazilian dictatorship indigenous lands in the mid-west were invaded for the construction of the national road BR-174 and the installation of a mining company. Illustrations about the period, created by the indigenous population, including children, reveal a traumatic history, referring us to the present day.

Olhe Bem As Montanhas

Ana Vaz

 “Look closely at the mountains!”: the phrase was coined by artist Manfredo de Souzanetto during Brazil’s years of dictatorhsip. Mining activities were destroying the environment in the state of Minas Gerais in the south west of the country. Through editing, Ana Vaz draws parallels between this region and the very distant Nord-Pas-de-Calais in northern France, also marked by over three centuries of mining. On one side, eroded mountains plague its inhabitants with deadly landslides. Hollow and gutted, these mountains become the receptacles of a ghostly memory. On the other side, in France, mining waste stacks become mountains and reservoirs of biodiversity, where the frontier between nature and technology is now indiscernible.

Há terra!

Ana Vaz

"Há terra! is an encounter, a hunt, a diachronic tale of looking and becoming. As in a game, as in a chase, the film errs between character and land, land and character, predator and prey."

Un Film, Réclamé

Ana Vaz, Tristan Bera

The ecologic crisis is a political, economic and social crisis. It is also cinematographic, as cinema coincides historically and in a critical and descriptive way with the development of the Anthropocene. A Film, Reclaimed is a conversation, an essay that reads the terrestrial crisis under the influence and with the help of the beautiful and terrible films which have accompanied it.

A Idade da Pedra

Ana Vaz

Ivonete dos Santos Moraes

A voyage into the far west of Brazil leads us to a monumental structure - petrified at the centre of the savannah. Inspired by the epic construction of the city of Brasília, the film uses this history to imagine it otherwise. "I look at Brasília the way I look at Rome : Brasília began with a final simplification of ruins". Through the geological traces that lead us to this fictive monument, the film unearths a history of exploration, prophecy and myth.

Entre Temps

Ana Vaz

Mona Dolphin, Ana Vaz

A meditation and a reverie upon a city at once real and imagined. Conceptualized as a documentary on the ZUP buildings in France, the film has instead found form as poetic & expansive confrontation with the psychogeography of a contemporary Europe in crisis. A requiem for a city dreamt between its past and present.

Occidente

Ana Vaz

In a spellbinding, textural blend of 16mm and HD video, Ana Vaz refracts the colonial history of Brazil and Portugal through objects, gestures, and contemporary customs.

Amérika: Bahia de las Flechas

Ana Vaz

It is said that in the year of 1492, the first European ship led by Christopher Columbus, disembarked on the coast of Samaná, present-day Dominican Republic, and was received by a rain of arrows carefully plotted by the Caribbean Taíno. Presently, a saline lake named after the Taíno chief Enriquillo witnesses profound eco-systemic changes leading to species migration, forced evacuation and an expanding choral desert revealing the lake’s geologic past. Taking the camera itself as an arrow, a foreign body, Amérika: Bay of Arrows looks for ways in which to animate, to awaken, to make vibrate again this gesture in the present - arrows against a perpetual “falling sky”.

Amazing Fantasy

Ana Vaz

Defying gravity, a game of levitation becomes at once the possibility of magic; or a translation of an irrepressible desire for mastery.

Sacris Pulso

Ana Vaz

Cláudia Pereira, Ana Vaz

Sacris Pulso departs from the dismemberment of another film, "Brasiliários". This film is an interpretation of Clarice Lispector's chronic "Brasília", her vision of the modernist capital, as it is the film which marks the encounter of my mother, playing Lispector, and my father, composer of the film's sound score. Through the juxtaposition of "Brasiliários" with a series of reassembled found footage, the film takes the form of a voyage of remembrance and imagination, of a past and future time dreamt between personal and collected materials, between memory and fiction.

Les Mains, Négatives

Ana Vaz

A postcard, Saint-Ouen flea markets.

Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs

Beatrice Gibson

Adam Christensen, Basma Alsharif

Based on Gertrude Stein’s eponymously named screenplay, written in 1929 as European fascism was building momentum. Beatrice Gibson’s adaptation, set almost a century later in contemporary Paris, deploys Stein’s script as a talismanic guide through a contemporary moment of comparable social and political unrest. An original soundtrack, written especially for the film by British composer Laurence Crane, responds to the repetition, duplication and duality at play in Stein’s script. Both a fictional thriller and an act of collective representation, Deux Soeurs proposes empathy and friendship as means to reckon with an increasingly turbulent present.

PSEUDOSPHYNX

Ana Vaz

Pseudosphinx is the scientific name of the fire-caterpillars soon to become butterfies, or as they're commonly (and auspiciously) called: witches. These butterfy-witches are associated with several myths. Pseudosphinx is at the same time sphinx, meaning inhuman chtonic monstrosity that spells charades; and pseudo, as in artificial, insincere, deceptive, unreal, illusive, mimetic. Pseudosphynx keeps its meaning veiled, like a secret kept by those who save in their retinas the haptic impression of its fight. [Punto de Vista]

13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Ana Vaz

Vera Amaral, Paula Nascimento

Taking its title from the poem by Wallace Stevens, the film is composed of a series of attempts at looking and being looked at. Beginning as a city state commission under the name and attitude of “Unschool”, the film became a kaleidoscope of the experiences, questions and wonders of a couple of high school students after a year of experiences with filmmaker Ana Vaz questioning what cinema can be. Here, the camera becomes an instrument of inquiry, a pencil, a song.