Learning from Dry Ground Burning

Dec 16

Joana Pimenta, Co-director of *Dry Ground Burning*, in conversation with Fábio Andrade (left) and John A Bruce (right), and with MFA Transdisciplinary Design program, at The New School, Parsons.

“We wanted to make a film where you could never tell if this was real or not real.” – Joana Pimenta

Written by Yuvan Kumar and Eduardo Staszowski

The film Dry Ground Burning (or Mato Seco em Chamas) (2022), co-directed by Adirley Queirós and Joana Pimenta, is a remarkable example of collective fabulation. It stands out for its unique blending of documentary and fictional narrative elements, creating a rich assemblage that challenges viewers to consider the authenticity of the story being told.

Pimenta shared their filmmaking process during a visit to The New School's Transdisciplinary Design MFA program in the Fall semester of 2023. (full transcript below)

Set in the Sol Nascente community within the Ceilândia district on the outskirts of Brasília, Dry Ground Burning chronicles the lives of two sisters, Chitara and Léa, and other women involved in illicit oil trading. The narrative mirrors the political climate of Brazil during the Bolsonaro regime and explores themes of national identity, especially in the context of significant oil and gas reserves discovered in Brazil in 2000. It also addresses the marginalization of the worker groups who built Brasília and were subsequently relocated to Ceilândia in the early 1970s.

The concept of "ethnography of fiction" is central to the filmmakers' work, as it involves revisiting collective memory while intersecting with current realities to contemplate a possible future. A key aspect of their approach is the choice to invite non-professional actors from Sol Nascente, which contributes to the film's realism. This decision allowed the narrative to be shaped by the non-professional actors' real-life experiences with fictional elements, creating a dynamic where the fiction introduced at the outset became an integral part of the actors' everyday reality.

The film's process is highly improvisational and responsive, with the directors choosing not to use a fixed script and deciding on the scenes to be shot on a day-to-day basis, which allowed real-life events to influence the film's development and enhancing its narrative depth, a decision that also allowed for a thorough exploration of the themes and the community's dynamics. Pimenta and Queirós privileged process over the final product. In Pimenta’s words:

“I choose projects where I’m always going to be in awe of what I find, as an ethnography of a fiction we’re all building.”

In a conversation held at The New School, Pimenta named collective fabulation as critical to the creation of the two-and-a-half-hour film. In an interview last year, the directors said:

“Ethnography of fiction is a process we propose with the aim of arriving at a political fable which re-signifies a collective memory. We interfere in the historical present to imagine a possible future.”

And in doing so, they managed to bring a texture of authenticity to the process which is situated unmistakably in a specific space and time.

Ethnographies of fiction – crafting a political fable that redefines collective memory, disrupting the historical present to envision a possible future – is fundamentally a transdisciplinary method. The directors added:

"We proposed to the protagonists fictional histories and archetypes of bodies ready for a confrontation with the real, with the space constructed by contemporary political narratives."

Dry Ground Burning approaches the aesthetics of representation – of those in political or economic struggle – in a non-traditional way. The film tries to reach beyond a reductionist representation. In doing so, they entered 12-month contracts with the actors to build trust. The process is a political decision.

In many ways, Dry Ground Burning lived and continues to live beyond its running time. Local communities became bonded over this experience of access and representation. The actors – despite winning at film festivals – did not show up to collect these awards. However, Léa did get invited back to prison to give acting workshops. Pimenta said:

“Some things happened in the process of distribution that really surprised me. The film was playing in French prisons for about two weeks on an open channel every day in the inmates’ cells. Léa got invited to give acting workshops in the prison and that for her was super important."

Dry Ground Burning has been recognized at various film festivals, underscoring its success in transcending conventional storytelling and engaging audiences in a dialogue about the complexities of reality and fiction.

The conversation with Pimenta has been transcribed, edited, and condensed to provide clarity on these topics and to offer insight into the innovative filmmaking process behind Dry Ground Burning.

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Joana Pimenta is a filmmaker from Portugal, living and working in the Unites States and Brazil. Her latest film Dry Ground Burning, co-directed with Adirley Queirós, tells the story of the Gasolineiras de Kebradas - a group of women from the periphery of Sol Nascente who steal oil and resist Bolsonaro’s presidency - as it echoes through the walls of Colmeia, the women’s prison of Brasilia.

Fábio Andrade is a PhD Candidate in the Cinema Studies department at NYU, a film critic, researcher, and artist with works in film and music.

John A Bruce is Associate Professor of Design Strategies at The New School, Parsons, and is Co-Director of MFA Transdisciplinary Design (TD) and the Consortium for Transdisciplinarity.

Not present:

Adirley Quierós was a professional footballer from the age of 16 to 25. He then studied film at the Universidade de Brasília, from which he graduated in 2005. He became involved in the cultural life of Brazil and directed his first film Rap o canto da Ceilândia (2005), which won thirteen Brazilian awards. With his documentary A Cidade é Uma Só? (2010), Queirós participated in international film festivals such as World Cinema Amsterdam, Brazilian Hollywood Festival and BAFICI in Argentina. White Out, Black In (2014) is his fifth film. He co-directed Dry Ground Burning (2022) with Joana Pimenta.

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From left: Zoë Rayn Evans, Fabio Andrade, Eren Ocal, Hala Abdel Malak (TD Co-director), Medha Dhoundiyal, Joana Pimenta (*Dry Ground Burning,* Co-director), John A Bruce (TD Co-director), Sukanya Pasi, Eduardo Staszowski (TD Co-director).

We've had the luxury of sitting with your film Dry Ground Burning, screening it during our TD Convening Week and thinking through the larger ideas of collective fabulation, considering the process through which the film was made, and reading the wonderful interview (with the Co-directors) conducted by Aily Nash. Our TD faculty – Eduardo Staszowski, Jen van der Meer, Jane Pirone, Sam Mejias, Barbara Adams, and others, have been thinking and talking about this work for very particular reasons that are germane to our MFA TD practice space.

Thank you John (Bruce) and Eduardo (Staszowski) for the invitation, and thank you all for being here in conversation and for all your work coordinating my visit.

Let me begin by sharing a little about Adirley, since he is not here with us. We just spent four months filming, we work together so closely. We normally do these talks together, but he's in Brazil right now. Every time I speak about him and he's not here, it's a little bit odd. He was a professional soccer player until he was 26, 27 years old and got injured randomly. Ended up in film school at the University of Brazil. Yeah, incredibly randomly because no one in his family had gone to the University. But Brazil has an amazing system of quotas that was implemented during the Lula government. In which after a certain moment, half of the people at university needed to be black or indigenous or coming from the periphery. And finished with a short film called Rap, O Canto da Ceilândia and immediately started making work with the people he was close with, with his friends, the people he hangs out with every day. He made a feature, and then made another feature called White Out Black In. I saw it for the first time in Argentina, which is where we met, at a festival. I was there with a film; he was there with a film, and doesn't speak English. A friend asked me to have dinner with him and other people. And I said, no, because I didn't want to be stuck with the only like non English speaker for a whole night. And then we met and we spent like three days talking and we realized we had so much in common, particularly our interest in sci-fi, I guess in the relationship between science fiction and the cities we were living in. We talked a lot about that and still today. We watch a lot of films together, but we end up talking mostly about literature and books. And I think that's where our references, especially when we are making work, still come from.

I had never been to Brazil. But he saw my film at that festival and asked me to be his cinematographer. And I said no, because I, I was at a moment, I was still in a PhD program. I felt, like many of you in graduate school, like, this is my time. I get to, you know, spend some time where I don't have to be having 10 jobs, and it's the time for my work, and I was working mostly by myself. I had made a film with my mother. She was not in it, but she was driving me around. It was just the two of us. So that was the first film that played here in New York and in Toronto. And that was also kind of a surprise. I was at that moment in which I felt like I was figuring things out. I was working completely alone making work just for myself that then by chance had just, you know, I was lucky that he had found a place to be screened and I didn't know, I was trying to figure out what that meant. And now where do I go? And so, we came up with a plan.

Sorry, but just before I go into that, it's funny if you think about how you ended up seeing the film because Brazil produces about 130 features a year, the numbers may have changed after Bolsonaro, because they cut a lot of the funds, but hopefully now with the new government they're back to the same level or even higher. So, it's high, I mean, you know, like American film programmers are not gonna see 130 features from one country because they have all the countries in the world to see features from. So, it's interesting to think about how the film got to you. Because there's, I don't know how it works in your specific fields, but at least in filmmaking, there are programming gatekeepers that function as liaisons between what is produced in the country and what gets to the outside, right? So just like a side note before getting further into the story, which is that I saw White Out Black In at a festival in Argentina, Mar del Plata, and sent it to the to the director of this program that John was talking about, Art of the Real at Lincoln Center, whose name is Dennis. And Dennis had never seen the film and I, and I was traveling in Mozambique at the time and from the moment I got onto the flight until I, I think I had a layover in Paris when I opened my email and I had like 10 emails from Dennis being like, what is this film? How can I talk to this filmmaker, who's the producer. And so it's just interesting to think that it was completely by chance, you know, like it was me being in Argentina seeing this film, and because I teach at Harvard and knowing Dennis, and sending it to him, and the film lands in New York. But it's just like, for me, it's important to think about local contexts and how much of the work that is produced in Brazil that is so exciting for me, maybe it's not the most resolved formally or it doesn't adhere to this world cinema language–what the gatekeeper programmers normally show to the festival curators.

It's interesting to maybe fold into our conversation later. When Leo Goldsmith visited with us during TD Convening last week, we talked a little bit about Third Cinema, this notion of not only the way things are produced, but the way they move in the world, really considering how that can operate unbeholden or alongside of these other channels that can be restrictive as you're mentioning.

So, Adirley asked me to be his DP and I said, no, and then we make a, a plan which was, I was going to go to Brasilia. I was taking only medium format photographs and working with 16 millimeter film at that time and I'm Portuguese, I'm not Brazilian. I had never been to Brazil. This was 2014 or 15. And so he was like, OK, so you're not gonna be the DP but I want you to be an actress. And I was like, oh, I've never been an actress. I'm interested in that. I was a terrible actress. I jump to the end of this story. That is how I ended up being the cinematographer for the film. So you're gonna come to Brasilia. And I want you to only bring your 16 millimeter camera and your medium format. I had a Polaroid back on the camera. So it's like super heavy equipment and a sound recorder. And you're gonna spend a week by yourself in Brasilia. Brasilia is like a city like LA where you drive everywhere. I had no car. And I want you to make a diary and record yourself and take photographs. And then after a week, I'm gonna give you my address and you can come. He also gave me a character. You're an alien from outer space. The spaceship got lost in time but not in space. So, you landed in the right space where you're supposed, where there was supposed to be nothing but there's a city there because Brazil as John was mentioning at the beginning was a city that was built in the sixties, right? And so, if I had gotten myself lost in time but not in space and I landed there in 2015, then I would be seeing this new futuristic city. On the other hand, it is the city that was built for the construction workers that built Brasilia. So already begins in this very like tense relationship to the capital. That is the center of political power, which is where all the politicians spend time where the president lives where the public servants. So all the is the sort of the political and administrative capital, of the country. And so I did that and that was weird and, it made me make a lot of work. It made me also like the fact that I had to walk where everyone drove, made it so that I could never leave anywhere. Like, once it took me an hour to cross the road because there's no cross really, no one walks. And so it was very strange to me to be in a place like that. And I recorded myself a lot, but I was a very bad actress. There was also my resistance to being the DP, I don't know how to work with a crew. I didn't know how to work with other people, right?

But he found a way around it, it was just like, ok, so you have a character, you perform and that's your way into working with other people, right? He was directing me as if I was a performer in the film. So, I could completely relate to the work of the non-actor who's building a character that is based on their life and based on something that is fabulated or that we construct together. And I knew how to make images because I had a connection to the capital. I was building a connection. This was a way of working, directing the people you work with as if they are performers in the work and creating a form of fabulation with everyone, because it's such a small crew, everyone needs to believe in, was super interesting to live through. And I think it informed a lot of the work that we ended up doing together, we started writing Dry Ground Burning, right? As we were filming once it was Brazil. So, it's a project that we had been working on for a very long time because we had to, we wanted fiction money. We thought, nonfiction films get very little money and fiction films get all the money. We're gonna go for fiction money. But that meant that we needed to write a script. Obviously we didn't film it, but we still needed to write it and get it through the funders, and make them believe that was the film we're making. We started really early, kind of like trying to think through what that film could be.

That's beautiful context. I wanted to pull out one thread which is, you know, I mentioned this film that we didn't see White out Black In, and, and Joana kind of included that in this kind of origin story of how she entered this, you know, space that Adirley works in. It's similar to Dry Ground Burning in that it's a mash up, it defies genre, right? It's kind of a western, it's kind of a sci-fi, it's kind of Afrofuturism, it's political, it's gritty, it's hybrid and the main character is a person in a wheelchair who is also a DJ and also lives in a space that's kind of like a spaceship. So, these are the things I knew about the film, and I was like, I'm going to watch that film! And this is somebody who you said, and I didn't know this, that he appears at the end of Dry Ground Burning. Fabio, I don't know if you want to chime in.

Thanks for having me. John, everybody, the staff, the department, students, Joana. It's great to be with Joana to talk about cinema. I actually came across Adirley Quierós' work in 2010. I started working as a film critic in Brazil in 2007. And it was an interesting time. We were halfway through the Lula administration. So, we're starting to get some results, like public policies that have been implemented over the years. And one that was very crucial and I think under underestimated was a program called DOC TV. That was, well, Brazil is a very big country, right? It's almost as big as the United States. And cinema has often been concentrated in very specific parts of the country. And it was a grant, I think around 2006, 2007, and lasted a few years where there would be regional grants. They would choose a project in every state of the country to fund, to make a documentary that was normally around 15 minutes long for television. And many directors who would later become sort of household names in the international Film Festival circuit actually started making their first feature attempts with DOC TV, many of them made longer versions of those films that ended up becoming theatrical releases. So, like someone like Gabriel Mascaro who did Neon Bull directed one which I saw in 2010, which was about soccer, it was all about the life of professional soccer players who are not playing the A league. And who like were preparing to have like this one local game against the big team because they, they would be on television and maybe they would get hired by a larger team. So it was a very interesting film still, you know, interesting perhaps for me at the time, primarily for the topic. And it was only two years later when I saw is this city, the only one and I actually met in real life that I was just like, oh boy, now I have something new here that I was not prepared for because it I think the what, what you wanna mention about affirmative action and, and quotas was so crucial to the transformation of Brazilian cinema in the past couple of decades because we had people from many different backgrounds, having access to resources to make work, but also to challenge the institutional spaces in ways that we, that people just couldn't foresee. And I think, became very associated with that moment because it was a very different type of cinema, even though projects like DOC TV, for example, allowed people to experiment a lot and these students didn't really travel much. People were actually taking a lot of risks in the like 2008, 2009, testing all different hypotheses and only folks like me were watching it, which was very exciting. Something new was happening. It was actually coalescing into something that was not only addressing the history of Brazilian art and Brazilian cinema, but that was also adding something to it, that to me was new and I was unfamiliar with at that point. And, that included just Adirley's presence in film festivals as well because, you know, if you ever see him speaking, he's an amazing thinker, right? And Joanna, when she's working with him as a translator is like the most impressive translator I've ever seen, besides being a wonderful filmmaker. And because he speaks very fast and his brain is very fast, he's pours out ideas all the time. And, he also had this very peculiar way to work. He is a filmmaker from peripheral areas in Brazil who at the same time went to university, had access to funding, decided to stay and make work there. Also looking for some kind of otherness and friction like he makes. For example, you mentioned White Out Black In and it is, you know, a white man making films, collaborating with black men of his age. And then he starts working with Joana, a woman who's Portuguese. I think he always pursues difference as a creative motor for his work. I think he's very interested in what generates the friction of different people being together and working together, and creates something that perhaps none of them would have created by themselves.

Thank you. I'm going to ask a couple more questions. But before I do, I thought it would be interesting to collect a few questions from the room.

Audience

Hi, thank you so much for being here. I'm really interested in the collective nature of this project. The unfolding. We like to think that art is working in a vacuum and it's not. How do you communicate the urgency of this work and this project to people who, you know, ultimately have a say in how it's shaped, how it's distributed, how it's funded, who gets paid and all of that. I'm always interested in that. Thank you.

Audience

I'm super-interested in both of your thoughts on some of the emergent technologies, especially generative AI vis a vis this notion of fabulation, but also vis a vis the accessibility of production. And like the affordances and some of the ways this is groundbreaking. And then on the flip side, some of the concerns and some of the things that might really undermine the type of work you're trying to put out.

Audience

I'm also very curious about the process in terms of where decisions needed to be made. Especially because it seems to be a very organic process where not everything was meant to be planned or, or thought ahead. So, it really makes me very curious, what were those points, kind of like, OK, now I need to make this decision in terms of the process? Is there a part of research and rationalization versus a process of discovery through making?

Audience

I'm interested in kind of digging deeper on these two points that you both mentioned. The intertwining, fabulation and performance as ways of working together and really kind of dig in, right? As you know, the friction of difference arises in those spaces, right? And how do we capitalize on using that and driving that as a creative process?

Audience

Talking about Third Cinema, and filming with real people, I really wonder about once you have a finished product how, and especially because there's not even a cinema in the neighborhood where the film takes place, how do you reach these people? And was that even your intention to reach neighborhoods so that they would see this?

Yeah, just a point of clarification… in that city, there isn't really a film culture or a cinema. So it's a really kind of very interesting contextual frame to then be working in this particular way.

Audience

But that gets me to wonder how do you get non actors, to activate them?

I'll add a question that is similar to that, which is this notion of the performance of ethnography, to play oneself. There's something very, very real and there's something very grounded, but there's a, there is a performative element.

I want to respond to all the questions. We're gonna be here until 10 p.m.

Audience

I think it's something that came out with Leo, right? The importance of the final product here is the film of the, in my opinion, what was filming in many real situations that was prompted by the process of making the film. For instance, I think you, you created the headquarters of the PCP party. Andrea was campaigning for, you know, real policies of, you know, alternatives to state land systems or policies of extraction, exploitation, mass incarceration, labor, et cetera, right? I believe, I think I read in one of your interviews that there were conversations with school children, right, in that process? So, I think there's, I mean the film, the process of making this work activated so many real things, right? And then you have the film, right? So how do you balance this in your work? The importance of the film and the importance of everything that happened in that process and might be happening because of what you might have triggered?

Audience

My personal reading of this film, one of the main things was rebellion as an alternative to, you know, the inequitable realities existing in the system, even worldwide. But also, it makes me wonder with this, this fabulation, about the language of the fabulation. It is rendered in a drastically different cultural, social or political context. What are some like potential measures that you considered, or not, to somehow make it more transferable?

Audience

It was mentioned that if you press a button, it actually does something. So, I'd love to hear a little bit more of the importance of things working to what the film is doing and also on this performing ethnography work.

Ok. These are all really good questions. If I don't get to respond to something you've asked, please get my email from John or Eduardo. Please write to me. We can talk a little bit over email. I'll be very happy. I mean, it's just like, again, it's just, it's so great to me to, to all of us that people spend two hours and a half with the film and then read a 20 page interview and I'm so honored.

OK, so I can start at the end and go to the beginning. I guess about compromises, making decisions and where does our commitment stand? I guess that's an easy one. We made a two hour and a half film. 1 hour and 50 minutes is the limit for a theater slot. If you have a film, a feature film that is more than an hour and 50 minutes long, you're gonna have a really hard time getting it distributed, getting it into festivals, it takes up the space of two films. So, this is very practical. But then at the end of the day, it kind of like mirrors how we're making decisions from the start. We made a two hour and a half film because our agreement with the actresses was that they were not gonna lose. Our perfect "Let's submit this to Cannes" film ended when Léa (the actor playing the main character) gets arrested again. And that was the feedback. That was the feedback we got from everyone. Léa goes back, she goes back for a can of deodorant. She's in jail again. The film ends, we could never end the film there because we told them, we make it very simple at the beginning, we honor it throughout and you know, we're making more films there, we're making more films with these people. If we break it now... we have no credibility to continue working. So, it was both impairing what the work we were making and what we could make after. And so, they needed to burn the police car, they needed. We got actually got Léa out of jail for five days, and they were out of prison for five days and under house arrest with an electronic bracelet so that we could film the last sequences of the film. I flew from Cambridge to speak at her trial. So, there's like all of these ramifications that I feel conscious about and going into detail here.

But I think that the most important thing is that we're making a film first for the people we are making it with. Not in some wishy washy way, not in some, you know. Oh, you know, it is for the community. We have very... we have a contract, for instance, we have very specific rules. We, we never give like these people, a lot of these people have very, very little. It's a labor relationship and that keeps things very clear and it keeps everyone sort of with very clear expectations for what the work is going to be like. And we try to honor all those commitments from the beginning of the film to the end. And I hope that we are honest about it enough that it also creates a way of working in which what they are giving us is also very honest. And generous, we hope because that's how things have been put together from the start.

You've asked, there is a question about the theater, and the fact that there's no theater in this place, and there isn't. But we did take them to festivals and none of them wanted to see the film. They didn't see the film until it played on TV a couple of months ago in Brazil. Léa actually watched it. We made Léa watch it because of two things, because she didn't know that the trial came up in editing. And we wanted her to see it before the film was done to, to know if it was OK, And the women on the bus, her wife is in it and they're kissing. But there's also all these women kissing that had other partners. We just wanted to make sure. We were this during Bolsonaro’s government. And so, we forced her to watch the film. And she, she cried, she, she said one of the most beautiful things, she watched the last sequence and she started crying and she's said, "you turned me into a legend." And that was, you know, that made us feel very good about our two hour and a half film that everyone told us told us would never play anywhere because it was way too long and, you know, this doesn't fit cinemas.

I feel like the compromises and the decisions then become very clear once you set up your own rules. When we're shooting, we're looking for truth in what is happening, even if it is a fiction. So that means we have a long, a very long time to shoot, but we also repeat a lot of the things we make, we change locations, we change stories, we decide not to shoot at all and just spend time talking or drinking or, you know, having food. So, we wanted all this fiction money to extend our time for shooting. Everyone is on a 12 month contract, everyone's getting paid. So, it doesn't really matter if we shoot or not, unlike the other two month, three month film shoots. In this case, you know, if the neighbor was making noise, we would come back the next day. The film is not bigger than the city. The film doesn't need to impose itself onto space, and it's not bigger than anyone's lives to that extent. And at the same time, we are super rigorous. Everyone shows up for shooting, and needs to be on time. If there's a problem, we'll talk through it. But there's no kind of like, I don't know if I'm gonna be there tomorrow or not. And so we, for both ways, we know what we're counting on. You asked the question about funding and I think, sorry, what, what was your name? You ask the question about funding and how do you kind of like even start looking for money for a film that ends up looking like this? Right? I think that after I told you all about this, all about how, how honest we are, I think that to funders, we really lie. Sorry, we lie. And so, we actually, we even did labs, which is something that we both have a lot of strong feelings against. There's this Sundance lab for scriptwriters. I went to that, and then went to some version of in Brazil, and we have a lot of resistance because we feel like these are like factories of making films that look similar to each other, right? So, there's like "world cinema" and regardless of wherever in the world you are, it should look like world cinema, it should have a beginning, a middle and an end, and you know, someone in China should be able to get everything out of it the same way as someone in Brazil does. And so that goes to your question. I think that we did it because we knew we wouldn't get the funding without proving to these people that yes, we're scriptwriters, we can do plot twists and we have a hero's journey and here is the script knowing that we're never gonna film that. But it's what paid for the film. So, then you do it, you know, and then you just make sure that you're not signing anything that says that you have to shoot exactly that. And then, I think that the script is also very useful. I think that's structuring. I come from the Sensory Ethnography Lab. If I had any film school that was it. And so, script writing was crazy to me.

The script was structure, and the script was really useful to have first conversations with the actors that were gonna be in the film. So even though we're lying in the sense that we're like, the city at the end of the film, the city was gonna explode and we needed, I don't know, half a million dollars. We were trying to justify where we're gonna get the money, because if we tell them like, we're gonna make a film for a year, gonna shoot for a year and a half, and we don't know what we're gonna shoot the next day... whatever happens today determines that, you know, no one's going to want to fund that. Bolsonaro was not even in the picture yet, but the Dilma (Rousseff) government was just about to pass a law in Congress that the royalties from oil had to go to education, culture, education, health. And so just imagine in a country like Brazil, injecting billions and billions of dollars into three areas, you're gonna have a university, you're gonna have so much research being done. It was just like you had by law, you were required to spend it in education, culture and health. It's gonna be like a complete revolution. There would be no country in the world like Brazil and of course, that needed to be stopped. So, so that led to a coup. It was just that we didn't know that something even more horrible was gonna come. Took over, and the first thing he did was to revoke this law. The second thing that was to sell oil reserves to international companies. So many of them are now not even owned by Brazil, which was the country who put all this money into finding them. So, a lot of like state funding went to renting these drills that cost a million dollars a day. And this is also kind of fabulation, based on an idea, right? Based on this dream that there may be oil there, and we're gonna find it, right? And so, we begin making the film at this moment. We're doing all this research trying to think about the oil narrative in Brazil, the sort of defining moment in Brazilian history when this president says the oil is ours, the oil is nationalized. It belongs to the country, right up until this moment of excitement in which oil is about to be required to go into these three areas. And it is going to really make a change in the life of the country. Then with Bolsonaro’s attention, the kind of like going through the opposite of that. So, between the moment in which you write the film and we begin filming it because so many years go by between you write a script and you get the money and all of this is like a long complicated process, the film has completely changed. So, the script, it would, the script was an adventure, you know, it was just like this complete adventure of like stealing oil and kind of like having a lot of parties.

When we start filming, it's just so clear that Bolsonaro is going to become president and no one is looking for an adventure. We're all feeling rather melancholic.

We would go around town to find people on the street, in bakeries, in gas stations. Their first question was always, is this a porn film? Because why would you want to be making cinema in Sol Nascente? We're like, no, we're real filmmakers, you can look us up on youtube, you know, come with us for a conversation. Once we get to the point in which they're reading the script, it becomes very clear for them. So it's gonna be political, there's gonna be guns, there's gonna be this.

From the start, we wanted to deal a lot with the history of the single mothers who built the city. When it was built, it was kind of like the removal of the construction, construction workers who had built a new capital to a city 50 kilometers away where there was nothing. And a lot of the people who came were these women who were like serving their men as prostitutes in this free zone. And so, there's a lot of single mothers that came with 3 or 4 Children that were kind of got dumped by trucks in the middle of nowhere and had to go look for water, build a shack. And these are the mothers of Chitara and Léa who were also single mothers themselves, who had kids when they were 13 and 14. And so we wanted this sort of like thread to be important for what you were building and that was present in the script from the start.

The script is also really useful to build sets. Our set designer is an architect. She's not someone who comes from cinema and that is incredibly important to us. And it's sort of like remains one of the, one of the ways in which directing actors and building sets go hand in hand. For instance, I'll tell you, I don't talk about the story of how we found house in the interview. We found it through the guy in the wheelchair after many encounters and things not going ok.

Léa, we had a meeting with her, she read the script and she was like, "I know how to shoot a gun, I worked at a gas station, I'm a single mother and I smoke a lot." OK. We started filming and she was amazing, obviously. But then we needed a house for her and building a house in this context doesn't mean let's find a set where we hang out sometimes and we like the light. We were looking at rentals on the internet websites where people rent houses, right? We were signing a one year lease. It was a big commitment. We found this lot at the very end of Sol Nascente and this is, I think this is the only moment when I got scared. I because I was just like, the police won't go into the middle to the to the bottom part, they don't enter. So, if we had a problem, we couldn't really call anyone. Also, I didn't know what we were setting ourselves up to.

We filmed with a big camera. But there's something like only four or five of us, and we try not to behave like cinema people, you know, like, we never close the street, we don't like cargo pants with many pockets and many accessories. No walkie talkies. I mean, I think that's the thing, you know, we both refuse to work in that way. I teach, and other there's other things I can do. We can survive basically, but we wanna work with very few people, with a lot of time, not closing down streets, not bringing in a lighting truck, but being super rigorous about what we make, and very formal and thinking very formally about the images, the aesthetic.

So, you're getting a lot of aesthetic value despite not having those typical layers of production.

Of course, and it's also political because this idea that if you make films with poor people, they all need to be shot with an old cell phone and like look shaky. So, so I mean, no, we, what we're proposing is that we want to make cinema in Sol Nascente, the people we're working with are actors. So, we rented a lot. We found that lot in the last street, and it overlooked the nearest city. It was near this valley where they're building the new prison in the film. That's not really what they're building, but where they're building the new prison. But how is this going to work? We went door by door and talked to all the neighbors. I just remember us going into this bar where all these heavy hitting drug traffickers were. And she said, like, this is my friends, Joanna and, and blah, blah. And we're trying, I'm trying, you know, I also like, I'm Portuguese, I speak with a Portuguese accent and I don't change that. I don't change, switching to a Brazilian accent. So, it's clear. I'm not from there. You know, I also like, look like this. I tried to speak in a Brazilian accent once on set and they were all laughing at me. So, it became very clear, I couldn't do that. The first question that they had for her is like, oh, are they police? And so, we begin like very, very, incredibly slowly building relationships with people. We basically built a functioning oil platform in that space.

Did the neighbors think it was real?

They thought it was real after a year and a half.

At the beginning we were like, "Hi, we're making a film." Obviously, at the beginning, everyone got us like, you're making a film, this must look like television. Everyone gathers and then it's so boring, you know, because it's like four of us and it takes us like half an hour to decide... should we come from here or there? And then they're just like, oh my gosh. This is too boring. I'm leaving. And there's no famous actors anywhere.

So, anyway, so we rented the house for one year. We always have meetings there; we would eat there. The meat you see that they're cooking in the film was dinner afterwards. There's a lot of time that we spend just around the spaces, trying to think about what we're doing. And that means that everyone feels ownership and feels invested in what we're creating because they saw it being built from the very first moment.

Why it's so important to have this contract and have these rules from the start? This is a fiction film. We don't care if what they tell us is a truth or a lie as long as it appears true in the film. And if they say something that they don't want to include and they tell us right away or they tell us later, we will not include it. And that stands for, you know, they're talking about some guy who's really dangerous and someone who will use their real name. And that could get them into trouble. That is not to say that at the end they can come and say, I don't want this to be in the film because I don't like it or I don't think I'm doing well. We're directing for better or worse and that was really good. If the film had been a disaster, it would also probably mean the last film for Adirley and I. We are making a fiction film together. We make decisions regarding what you're filming tomorrow, where things go, where the story goes, what is being proposed, who's in the film, who's out. They have some leeway because they can always boycott those people.

Léa was imprisoned for the first eight months that we were filming. So, we wanted a professional actor to play the part, and we brought some professional actors in, and the others were just like, "they need to go now." The films with nonprofessional actors that I've seen gone wrong are when the director was just like, "oh, she has no money, she'll move into my place." I think that the way we were talking about difference, respecting difference, is super important here. They think I'm from outer space, right? They either offer me jobs in brothels or they're just like, "oh, you're just not from here. You don't understand." They began respecting me because I'm carrying this really heavy equipment and I didn't have an assistant for very long time, and then I only had one assistant, right? Whereas most people doing cinematography for this would have 3, 4, 5 assistants and speaking with them without talking. It was just me. I assembled the camera. I carried the tripod. I'm the first one on set, and the last to leave.

We pick up everyone from home and we take everyone home. And so, it really is a relationship of labor that is being constructed and it's true that, that you get two things. One of them is to sort of like overcome the non-professional actors, resistance to acting because they'll be like, I can never act, act if acting is like, what I see on television, how could I do that? And you're just like, well, we're not interested in television actors, we're interested in you. And can we talk about this story or that story? And then tomorrow could we film it? Let's try it, text together, let's think about this. I don't expect you to just jump in front of the camera and know how to act. That's not the kind of film we're making. What we're making is just like we begin with a conversation and we fold filming in and then we insist and insist and insist until we got it. And I think that that insistence, that sort of refusal to let go, what led us to spend a year and a half filming, we literally stopped when we didn't have one cent to spend anymore. Otherwise, we'd still be filming today. So maybe it's good that we don't get a lot of money. Because there's like more films to make, I guess.

I think some of their reservation about seeing the film is just that they're not interested. I mean, to me, that's fascinating. Then we went to Rio. We tried to bring them here to New York when the film premiered here. But some of them still have records so it was not possible. And then, yeah, they couldn't get a passport. It became like this big thing. And so, the first festival they went to was, which is also super weird to them because then they had like all these like very famous actors, in Brazil, congratulating them. They won a lot of like best acting awards in Brazil. But they didn't wanna watch it then because they were in Rio, right? Like, why would we spend two hours and a half in the theater? Then Brasilia, on the screen in Brazil, it was really beautiful there because it's the city that is an hour away, and a lot of the motorcycle workers came. They watched 10 minutes, thought it was super boring, and went outside to drink. These people got all the acting awards and did not show up for the ceremony. So, I kind love how it's just like, yeah, it's just like it's a job and they're right, you know. Why should cinema be like... it's a, it's a job, it's a big job for you. So, there was a commitment to the process of the ethos and there is a commitment to this very clear relationship that also had a layer of a labor kind of relationship.

But then there's this kind of like, well, there's this other thing, which is this film thing, this object and yeah, maybe, maybe not. So, I think it also kind of starts to raise these questions of, you know, these kinds of endeavors and the relationship to this notion of aesthetics isn't just wed to a final product or, it's beyond, again, something you said in conversation a moment ago, you know, we often see representations of either political struggle or the economically, traditionally under invested, in a certain aesthetic. But you were all dedicated in this process that was reaching beyond representation. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about it.

I think that's super important actually because I think that thinking about you know, underdeveloped cinema or cinema with underprivileged populations, or cinema with people who are targeted by the States, or as representation, is a very impoverished way to think about it. And, and it's so common these days that this is what it does. And I remember Adirley once, which I thought was really beautiful that for him, the fact that they were making a film in that community, you can correct me if I'm misremembering it was, was in some ways the film was unnecessary for the political thing that they were doing because people start believing that there is an actual oil extraction thing happening because of the process and they change. Right. Exactly. They change their behavior, change, the imagination change. So, the possibilities that they envision for their lives change because they're engaged with that process, right? And, and I mean, I have no question that the end products for Joana, the directors, also changes because of that. But another thing that I remember him saying to me that was super eye opening. When I heard it like 10 years ago, that when you're working there, filmmaking has to look like a possible profession for the people that you're asking to work with you in the project. Because if it doesn't, they just cannot do it, if it doesn't promise some kind of financial compensation that will, you know, that will support them for like a year, for example. They have other stuff to do. They, they like they have to make money in other ways, they cannot just commit to that project. If that doesn't seem like a possibility of a job in, in a like a labor relation in a traditional way, which I think is super important to, to keep in mind when working with this specific kind of collaboration, right? Which is full of asymmetries and full of exchanges. You know, how, how can you think about a way that, you know, I think that it's really funny that in the film, there is the chance, right? Which I think is translated but is it is like long lived order and respect hierarchy? How can you make a film that is not doing that? If you're making a film that is against that, how does the film set, how does the creative process... is not hierarchical and it's not excessively ordered in a way that polices the people who are involved. Right? I think that coming up with the specific process that will enact, that politics is really important. And I think that that's one of the things that to me is super exciting about your work and today's work.

Yeah. And this notion of, again, the performance of ethnography and these non-actors being committed to something that is deeply tied to the way, you know, their lives, right? And at the same time, they too are invested in something that isn't about a reductionist representation. They're saying, I'm reaching and I'm stretching into these other ways of being. And I kind of, I find that at the heart of it, of what emerges to make this kind of cinema, particular film, this kind of an extraordinary gesture of, I don't even have the words for it. I think words like, you know, future and speculation are very reductive. But this is reaching, reaching from a place that is authentic. But again, it's not about, oh my lived experience has been X and I need you to represent it as X for Y.

I think that is about the open-ended nature of the process, the fact that we throw the script away and we don't know, we have it as a scaffold, but we don't want to shoot it. We want to be surprised by what we find unsaid every day because we both come from nonfiction and we still kind of like, believe in that, more than anything else, I think. But it's also kind of like knowing that you have the time and the space to direct the film in another way. In a three month shoot or a two month shoot you need to make scenes happen.

The economy of the process.

If it's not the right time, you have to shoot it anyway because if you don't shoot it today, that means you're compromising what you're supposed to be doing tomorrow or the day after, right? So, you're making choices that are like that, which I have nothing... I mean, I know of many in super-important and interesting films that were made in that way, just like, I don't know how to work like that, right? And so, I found some other way of working. I'll give you an example towards what you're talking about. When Léa gets out of prison, and she's as amazing, more amazing even than what we thought she was gonna be based on all the stories we had been hearing. I know that she and her sisters haven't seen each other for seven years. They share a similar, a duration towards their father who is one of the biggest criminals in. So I have a sister. And I know how complicated for, for those of you, of us have siblings, how complicated that relationship to my sister is. And so I know that there's a moment in which we are going to go really into their relationship as sisters. But it can't, that can't be forced or rushed, right? So then what happens is that is elected the lots that we had filmed everything in the lot as it was being built. Obviously, we have days and days and days of material that are not there. Not in the, we filmed everything like all the building of every single thing in that oil platform was filmed with some narrative attached to it. But had just been elected, he hadn't taken over government yet. So there's a period, there was a period of time before inauguration and the lot isn't ready. So now we, what we need to film is like the final moments of the oil already being pumped. So we filmed everything else and everyone is like, really demoralized because what they felt was basically the one of the first things so said was just like, that life in the prisons was, was gonna get even worse. Has two and their age sons that are now in prison as well. It's just like everyone in this place has a connection to prison. So you're saying that you're saying that already like 12 people who are living in a cell that fits four that have no where the food is getting spoiled are going to have worse conditions of life. So this is like all they can think about. So what we're thinking about in very abstract or rationalized terms as like the dawn of a new horrible form of politics for them is they're thinking about in similar ways, but we're very practical implications. And so I was just like, well, we're all feeling that we, we're facing it. Well, let's build a bunker. And so we built that bunker and we lit it like we went around junkyard. So I, I know I knew exactly how I wanted it to be lit. I knew exactly what I want and I knew that that was the moment when they were going to talk about their relationship as sisters. So, you know, we started talking and I was like, I want a very high ratio, dark and light space. So together with Natalia who is my camera assistant, we went around, we only use lights that you can find in electrical stores. So there's, there's two cinnamon lights in the film which are these battery powered led lights that we sometimes use because we're filming in the dark, in the middle of nowhere and without lights, there's no image, right? And so sometimes we use those, but we try to use mostly like car lights, fires that there's a lot of fires around the city. Like people just start a fire all the time. To like, you know, burn something or for, to get warm at night because it's very cold there at night over the summer. And so we, we went around and we found like those tubular lighting that sort of like the long fluorescent tubes,

Does everybody know the scene that we're talking about? It's in a location that looks like a bunker. It's a very long scene. It's a two-hander, it's the two women, and these fluorescent tubes leaning against the wall.

Right. Yeah. And it's like the kind of lights in an office. We found it in the junk yard. This scene was also the moment in which, more than any other moment, I knew like, OK, we're gonna close ourselves in this place for however long it takes... which ended up being two weeks, and this is when they're gonna start telling stories to one another. And so, it was just like, we're closed here. We cannot leave until inauguration. And when we leave, we're gonna have to dig a hole. And when we come to the outside, this will be a different country. And so, we were there every night, of course, we left, but we were there every night and, and, you know, it takes a long time before we even start filming and we just kind of like are getting into the the mood or the place or the effect. And, we repeat things a lot too, so that text about when she is arrested, that really beautiful 10-minute monologue about her sister's trajectory in the film... She breaks what we call in the cinema the fourth wall. She breaks the fourth wall, she's speaking directly at the camera, and she's speaking about us. The first time it was recorded it was outside in the oil platform and everyone was crying because we were just like, what the hell. And it wasn't right because her character would never cry when she tells that story. And so, we took those images and wrote down the text, and then I think... that's like the third night she's repeating it. It's maybe the 20th time. And she's such an amazing actor that she's saying it as if it's the first one, obviously and it's beautiful and it's so true. And most people think it's improvised, but it's maybe one of the most worked-on texts in the films. As is the beginning monologue when Lea tells the story of the film, I think we filmed that over a month or something. We're filming other things because she was under house arrest at that time. So, we just close ourselves in our house and film a lot with her daughter and all of that.

There's this other performance that is more important than the film. Going to the public schools and walking into a classroom, and saying "we have an oil platform and here's what we're thinking about doing. Here's the history of oil in Brazil." It's kind of amazing, and it was so important because then the kids tell their parents that there's this film that came to our class. We went to a lot of like neighborhood meetings, and neighbor's association meetings, during the political campaign. And no one watched the film but everyone has seen the film. They tell us, oh yeah, you guys are making this film that has that scene in the school and they were like, well, there's no scene in the school. But yes, you know, and so it's kind of like it, it's much larger than the final two hours and a half. And at the same time, maybe those don't matter and they all watch it on Pirate TV, because none of them have cable. And so, it was this form of access... they are like all forms of distribution, and so that these things can coexist. I think that's a really interesting point to this coexistence.

It is a film that played in prominent festivals across the world. Right now, it's on Criterion Channel. Yet it has many, many, many, many layers of existence and, and some of those layers are that the people have a relationship to the work without even having seen the complete film, having been a part of the process or seeing a piece of it or participated in a piece of it, and that has affect and resonance.

I wanted to add something that is connected to that individual comment about exploration, improvisation. I think, you know, part of what is sad about so much of resilience and not circulating very well abroad is that it also breaks the historical chains between worlds. I think that I see that as like a long-tested Brazilian technology in art, like working with improvisation, working with contingency. I was reading the other day an interview with Humberto Mauro who is probably the most prolific filmmaker ever in Brazil because he made almost 400 films between 1925 and 1975. He was actually developing some kind of Brazilian model that could be like Hollywood, except that he rejected the very basis of Hollywood, which is you need a document to work from. He never wrote a script. He was always working with improvisation, making a very different type of film, but still aware that reality was a collaborator in a way. And I think that another aspect that is undervalued about Adirley's cinema, even before Joanna starts collaborating with him, is this relationship with the local hip hop scene, which has already an entire tradition of improvisation that he was very close to as well. And, and at the same time, what that does, which is quite magical, is how you can actually see new collaborations on screen. So when Joana and Adirley start working together, the films are very different and I think that now with Dry Ground Burning, I think they have, like the editing in the film, they have something that reminds me of her work and, you know, and of the people who are in it. So you, the films really become this if they are directed and they have a signature, but at the same time, the signature is almost like a patchwork of different exchanges, right?

I think that's super-germane to our work here in this program in terms of a transdisciplinary practice, moving across lots of different forms, you know, not just image making, but also other modes of research, other expressions, whether it's music or politics or improvisation or theater or scholarly work.

Audience

I think maybe shifting a little bit back to your practice. How do you choose the work you're doing? You entered into Brazil and Brasilia by that invitation, suddenly it looks like you're talking about that–that city and how it was developed. But then, let's say the core of the story is oil. And then you explain to us the importance of oil to the national, let's say, history and how you had that moment of, you know, of dreaming about oil. And then so it started with oil or it started with something else. And then it kind of that kind of became... started to open up, where it started from Brazil or it started from oil, of course, Brazil is the center of power. So those decisions are made. So, there's this entanglement here. And now you said you're doing another film. Is there something that connects your body of work? I mean, there's a decision in your life that is... you're a filmmaker, right? And you work in this particular way, but how do you choose the work, right? And how to choose the work evolves? Is there a starting point, and then maybe you give it up or it became something that comes back? I'm asking because there's a point in this program where students are deciding what they're doing, right? And the form they're working with. How do you know, or even just begin to explore modes of experimenting, in your own practice? And a body of work too, right? How this grows over time.

It's very easy to be here, and talk about this film in this, you know, because everything worked out, right? You have to remember, while we were making it, it was like four of us for a year and a half or five of us for a year and a half, you know, talking because we're, I mean, I can, I cannot stress this enough. We build the fiction that we film as ethnography, but we film this as cinema, right? So, everyone's wearing a lot of hats, there's a lot of love, there's a lot of pain, painful attention being paid to the lighting, and so on. We are very aware, not necessarily of what kind of cinema we want to make, but what kind of image we want to produce. I think that's more. So we've seen a lot of films together with the actresses. We talked about acting. And we talked about like, you know, they know that they may need to wait for two hours until the light is right. The guys on motorcycles used to take me around and I'd be like, oh my God, these lights, and I would always be like chasing the lights, right? And he told me that once he told me like I saw a documentary about Lisbon this weekend on television and I think you're crazy because I thought that Lisbon was the most awful city in the entire world because you were, like, always looking at the light in the, with your eyes wide open. We're working all the time and there's no boundaries between things. That's what makes it possible. The film starts with the oil and with the history of the women we who built Sol Nascente. Those are the starting points. That's what we are researching, and by researching and reading, going to archives, reading books together, trying to think, trying to know as much as we can about this history.

There's a public archive in Brasilia that has both moving image and original documents that we looked at a lot. Research also means going to talk to people. We found a photographer, this old woman whose husband was the photographer, you know, like people in peripheries don't have home videos because they didn't own cameras. There was a city photographer. So, we went to her and looked at hundreds and hundreds of images that had been taken throughout the years that were in the basement. That kind of research... There's the official history and there's the history that the film is fabulating, and then there's the history that we don't know about yet, there is in the city somewhere, that we need to find. And one person leads to another, leads to another and you start hearing about how this street got constructed. Why is it called like that? Why is this person's nickname that? And so, we're very curious and we have time to work.

There are layers of knowledge. I think it's a great question. How do we really open ourselves to expanded notions of what an archive might be, or expanded notions of this practice, as your research becomes almost a curatorial practice as well. Where are you going to find these things? And they live within different layers, different registers, different spaces, and then you might add to an archive, and you're also constructing one that can transform the space and the way people think, speak, and act.

We filmed the people during the election on the ground where journalists were not going. Because for us, we were leading a political campaign and these were our opponents. We wanted to film them like face to face like, it was a combat or a confrontation but it's also an archive of a very specific moment in the history of Brazil. Who were the bodies that were performing that moment away from the big of power? And so, we're both kind of like researching an archive and we're building, constructing an archive that is half fictional at the same time. And we're very aware of that. We're also very aware of like how people take the film. Some people take the film as a documentary. But for me, the most documentary part of the film is what people think is fictional, which is Lea getting arrested for two cans of deodorant. People think we created that process, and that is the real part, sadly, right?

And to your question, like, how do you decide how you want to work? Coming from work in which is like inventing archives, I was making short films, but I was inventing archives and inventing archival materials, aging photographs with tea and things like that. And we were both like, we are not very interested in that question in the fiction. I teach a course at Harvard called documentary fictions. But we're not very interested in the question of the dividing line between both. And we wanted to make a film where you could never tell if this was real or not real. And we had no idea when we started, we had no idea how we'd get there. But that was the aim. We wanted to complicate things so much that it wouldn't matter, it doesn't matter–you're living this reality, this possible reality alongside these people. And they are fictions of... they're fictions and not at the same time and it's collaboratively constructed. But then at the same time, there's two people in this case, making decisions about editing, camera position, narrative, linearity of the story or not. And so sorry, it's hard to go back to your question. I think that for me, it's two things. It's what the film is and the mode of production. I get called. Now I get calls a lot to direct films with the homeless community in Portugal, or something. And I, I mean, it's not that I don't want to do it. It's just like my question is like, OK, so the way I work, I need four or five years. And I need to know if it's based on the book do we need to film the book? Because if we don't need to film the book, then maybe I'm in... can we have four or five years from beginning to end to get this done? And so, that excludes a lot of things and you know, I found other ways to make it work for myself. I teach and I know that that's like how I support myself because I'm making four or five year long films. Otherwise, I'd have to make them in a year or two, like other people who apply for this kind of funding. I choose the projects where I'm always going to be in awe of what I'm gonna find when I'm going to be, be functioning as an ethnography of a fiction or as an ethnography of a fiction, we're all building together which kind of like complicates that a little and there are not a lot of possibilities to work that way. I was just thinking, like the other night in this film, we're making two films now, I'm directing my film and he's producing it and then he's directing his film and I'm filming it again. So, we decided we didn't want to... after Dry Ground Burning, we are never co-directing ever again in our lives. And now we're just like, well, directing alone is just as miserable. So, we have a new project we're co-directing again for the next film. But right now we're trying it separately. I was just on set... I think that the thing we say the most to each other is, why don't we do this? And then someone will say like, oh, because we've done it. And so, I think it's just like trying to not fall into this. There's a lot of political parties in his films, but they don't look alike and it was just like, for us, it feels different... what we are proposing. And so maybe people who see the films together can tease out some connections. But for us, I think that the most important thing is we don't know what we're going to find... and how we set ourselves up for that?

I think you sort of answered the next question. Now that you've gone through this process of accepting ambiguity... would you rather keep doing this process?

I always think that the film I'm making is going definitely going to be the last. I'm not a very optimistic person and film making is very hard. And so, I'm always just like... things don't work out all the time. That's what I was saying. Like, it's really easy to be saying, oh, there were five of us and it was so great. But most of the time it was just like, you don't have whatever you need to, the shoot is not happening. The text is not working. I got pregnant during the shoot. Every day is just like where we have a million images. This is not going anywhere. This is definitely our last film. And so, because of that, there's also like a sense of freedom. If it's our last one, it doesn't really matter, we can do whatever we want. So, I don't know, like not having a sense of... I don't think that everyone is like that. It's just like in school, you feel like you need to, you need to just remember like when I was in school, I was just being like, OK, I need to make this and I need to do that and, and people telling me, like, don't worry, it's going to be fine and I didn't believe and I feel like it's the same with my advisor now. They're just like, I need to do this and that and I'm just like, no, don't worry. And then I'll be like, why are you telling me this anyway? So, but it's just like, but in retrospect the problems are the everyday problems, like who is going to play this? Where are we going to shoot this, this look? Right. Where is this showing? What's for lunch? Why is everyone hungry all the time? And you know, so can we just film for 12 hours? And we're always trying to go into something we don't know very well and we end where we know lots of people, people change a lot. Like she now has a fashion line, was taking breathing exercises the other day before a shot and I was like, what are you doing? And she's like, I watched a YouTube tutorial on acting and I was like, could you please not watch it? The problems are different. I don't want to work any other way just because I don't think I do very well. I think I do better when I'm able to find what my limits and restrictions are in collaboration with other people. And I'm not very good, you know, like I, I don't necessarily apply for co-production funds. I don't put my films in things that someone else will have something to say about the final cut because I'd rather make it with less money than have someone else who has no investment in the project come and say what it needs to be or look like. We'll make it with less money, we'll make it work.

We knew we had something that kept us chasing after. We just didn't know what it was and we really didn't, once we started editing, we really didn't know what it was. Some things happened in the process of distribution that really surprised me. The film was playing in French prisons for about two weeks in an open channel at noon and eight pm every day in the in the inmates cells. Léa got invited to give acting workshops in the prison and that for her was super important.

I'll invite Fabio to comment, and then give Joana the last word before we wrap up.

You've said you've shot dozens and dozens of hours now for two films in this place. There is a massive archive of footage, and I wonder if you've considered using this footage for other projects or if it is something that is very attached to that one situation?

I think maybe he (Adirley) wants to do. I don't, I can't. It was so draining to make a film like this. It was so hard to get to a cut. It was so hard to get to a film... I can't, for me it's done, I wanna do something else. Sometimes he toys with it. He was worked with the same sound recorded for all of his films for the last 20 years or something. Our producers in Portugal asked me to direct a TV show with the material that wasn't part of the film, which I was just like, sure, but find someone to else do it. I don't wanna do it. I mean, if someone wants to go in and take over... because there are entire characters that aren't part of Dry Ground Burning that were shot. But I think I ready for something else.

What is surprising to me, and maybe this is on my mind because of this new film we're making, is the afterlife or the outcome of work like this. Going in into making it, making it, and seeing it in the theater, seeing it with audiences... that was thrilling and a lot of energy. But what I didn't expect is kind of like what happens afterwards. And I think this is where the story begins to become a little complicated. The actors got all of these 'best actor' awards. May people now know about them, including television people, and they really want to act on television. They want to make money and they're right, but no one wants to hire them because they're considered too chaotic and too outside of the normal production roles. At the same time, television is a big industry in Brazil. Others want to bank on the credibility that these smaller independent films have. So now there's going to be a TV show that is shot in the same neighbor two streets above the lot that we had rented. They were paying the extras $500 a day, which is obscene in a place like that. You don't show up flashing bank notes in the middle of a periphery because it's obscene, and you eat where people eat, and blah, blah. And this television company didn't hire any of the actors that were in the film. They were filming two streets above; they were paying like ridiculous amounts of money to people to come and pretend they were on the street. They were bringing in the police to places you don't bring the police to and the director was flying in and out in a helicopter.

And so, I don't know, that makes me more reactive towards the possibility of cinema not having to be made in one way. The mode of production, what you're making, is intertwined and that mode of production is a political decision. When you start a work you need to be thinking about, not necessarily just like, is this a film that I want to make subject-wise, narrative-wise? But also, how is this being made? And can I sign off on that? And so, that changes very, very, very little. And so even when you know, they, with These women I've worked for a year and a half, they can completely act, they can completely act in a TV show, they're actresses. We even had them register their IRS as actresses. So, they could potentially work for other people, but these productions keep bringing these actors from Rio to pretend that they are local, they have an accent from wherever. So that's kind of like aftermath of things, that afterlife has become confusing.

I think that in terms of process, projects don't begin and end with us. The way in which we continue to learn from them, even if we're not directly in them, can raise new issues, new questions.

John Bruce

Learning from Dry Ground Burning

“We wanted to make a film where you could never tell if this was real or not real.” – Joana Pimenta

Co-creating Humanitarian Aid Photography: In conversation with Giorgio Faedo

An invitation into tender edges: On Lucian Castaing-Taylor’s visit to The New School