Brazil’s Ana Vaz: ‘The Past Never Passes’
Presented 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.