Brazil’s Ana Vaz: ‘The Past Never Passes’
variety.comPresented at Locarno’s Cineasti del Presente competition, the first feature film of Brazilian filmmaker and curator Ana Vaz portrays the battle between the urban expansion of Brasília and the misplacement of its local fauna.It reprises some of the artist’s obsessions as well as questioning the urban identity of Brazil’s capital, denouncing both its institutional role and the artificiality of its architecture.
The production has been possible thanks to an Italian, French and Brazilian collaboration carried out by Fondazione In Between Art Film and Spectre Films.This dark 16 mm avant-garde documentary begins with a series of long fixed shots and pans that ses us in the twilight that haunts Brasilia, whose frenetic distinctiveness drowns us into the deep shadows of an urban setting.
Vaz refers to her feature debut as “a film that comes off the dark, a piece that thinks and trembles with the dark”. “It is Night in America” images travel through twilight, dawns and shadows, but never full sunlight.
To be more precise, Vaz explains that she employed a day-by-night shoot technique – well known in the early days of filmmaking and that reached its peak during the heyday of the Western, “Day By Night”.
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