2023-10-13 22:22:30
In the largest favela in Brasilia, two sisters and some other women from the neighborhood make a living from a refinery. Around the perimeter of the house they occupied some time ago, the sisters discovered oil underground and from then on they produced gasoline.
They supply different gangs that move around on motorcycles, men who animate the parallel market of Brazil’s official economy. The house is not sumptuous, it looks the same as any other in the area, but it does stand out for the watchtower and other buildings linked to the extraction.
It may sound implausible, but on stage everything looks as credible as it is enigmatic.
The sisters are called Chitara and Léa. Just seeing them on stage is enough to justify the existence of the film. Who are they and what do they represent? Sometimes they smile, almost always they are armed, their faces show anger and severity.
Chitara is capable of killing if the situation demands it. Léa, for his part, he would not hesitate to aim his rifle either. They are characters, but the person who plays Léa, for example, had just gotten out of prison, after seven years in prison, at the time it was filmed. Dry bush in flames. So is it a documentary?
The great filmmaker from Ceilândia, Adirley Queirós, here accompanied in the direction by Joana Pimenta, deploys as never before all his political imagination at the service of a fantasy in which a resurrection pulsates, beyond the Dry bush on fire includes a passage in which Bolsonaro’s acolytes celebrate the triumph of the reactionary leader.
This documentary addition is part of the poetics of the filmmaker, who borrows from reality the abundance of concrete signs to turn them into fiction and thus overwhelm them with a will to rebel. Queirós calls this procedure “fictional ethnography.”
Everything happens in the movie. There are great scenes of confrontations with gangsters from the region, an indelible one about the fuel price negotiations between the bikers and the sisters, as well as incredible sequences where the representatives of the PPP (an imaginary political party led by companies that compete for mayors) They shout their proposals on top of a truck. There are so many scenes to point out.
Seeing the discreet expression of happiness on Chitara’s face in a key and brief passage in which the sisters remember the past is an undeniable pleasure. It is also true when Léa imagines a lesbian party in a bus in which she is actually traveling with other prisoners towards the penitentiary.
Queirós and Pimenta do not care too much about the linearity of the story. At certain moments, everything seems to happen in parallel time, as if it were a third-world dystopia that discusses and humiliates for its creativity the opulence of films like Mad Max.
The mere fact that the dispossessed are owners of the means of production and the oil belongs through both to the Brazilian people allows us to conjecture that what happens in front of the camera is symmetrical with what happens behind.
This film is also born from a way of making films that is entirely incommensurable with respect to current Brazilian cinema. Queirós’ chamber is equivalent to the sisters’ oil well. It is a cinema emancipated from the modes of representation characteristic of Brazil. What is seen belongs to another imaginary, that is why the plans set fire to the current order.
To see “Mato dry in flames”
Brazil, 2022. Director: Adirley Queirós, Joana Pimenta. With Joana Darc, Léa Alves. At the Hugo del Carril Cineclub.
1697236070
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