Thursday, April 7, 2016

4/13/16 Near the Wild Heart: The Films of Ana Vaz

Filmmaker will be present!
Ana Vaz (b. 1986, Brasília) is an artist and filmmaker whose films and other expanded works speculate upon the relationships between history and representation through a cosmology of signs, references and perspectives. A graduate from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Le Fresnoy Studio National, Ana was also a member of SPEAP (School of Political Arts), a project conceived and directed by Bruno Latour. Recent screenings include the New York Film Festival – Projections, TIFF Wavelenghts, CPH:DOX, Videobrasil and Lux Salon. In 2015, she was awarded the Grand Prize for the international competition at Media City Film Festival as well as the Main Prize at Fronteira Experimental and Documentary Film Festival for her film “Occidente”. Ana was the recipient of the Kazuko Trust Award presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in recognition of artistic excellence and innovation in her moving-image work. 

Sacris Pulso, Ana Vaz 2008 | 16-8mm transfer DVCAM | ST
Sacris Pulso departs from the dismemberment of another film, "Brasiliários", a filmic adaptation of Clarice Lispector's chronic "Brasília", a visionary text that looks at the inaugurated capital as a ruin of or from the future. Through the assemblage of "Brasiliários" with a body of 8mm found footage depicting rituals of travel and family, “Sacris Pulso” takes the form of a voyage of memory and fiction, of a past and future time calling upon the ghosts of Lispector, upon the spectral ghost of Brasília and sewed through the ties of a family fiction.

Les Mains, Négatives, Ana Vaz and Julien Creuzet 2012 | 15' | HD | color | ST
A postcard, flee markets of St. Ouen, Paris, 2012.
A Idade da Pedra (The Age of Stone), Ana Vaz 2013 | 29' | 16mm/HD | color | 5.1 sound
"As artificial as the world must have been when it was created"
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.
Occidente, Ana Vaz 2014 | 15' | 16mm/HD | color | 5.1 sound
A film-poem of an ecology of signs that speaks of colonial history repeating itself. Subalterns become masters, antiques become reproducible dinner sets, exotic birds become luxury currency, exploration becomes extreme-sport-tourism, monuments become geodata. A spherical voyage eastwards and westwards marking cycles of expansion in a struggle to find one's place, one's sitting around a table.