The Film Club: Dry Ground Burning

With ”Mato Seco em Chamas” (Dry Ground Burning, 2022) the filmmakers Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós blur the boundaries between fiction and documentary. The film was recorded with amateur actors over three years in the favela Sol Nascente in Ceilandia, an area built outside Brasília in the 1970s to control the influx of newcomers to Brazil’s capital.

In the film, we follow Chitara, her sister Lea and a gang of women running an illegal oil refinery. They sell the gasoline they make cheap to motorcycle-delivery riders, who are also seen as criminals. Their hard work pays off in freedom: one wants to start a brothel, another goes into politics handing out leaflets on the streets while Bolsonaro’s name is shouted out from the opposing side’s army tanks.

But the situation grows more alarming. After spending six years in prison Lea is reunited with her children and they make a film. With the help of fiction, she tells her life story and that of those closest to her.

After the screening, Joana Pimenta och Adirley Queirós will participate in a conversion, via zoom, with Benjamin Gerdes, Royal Institute of Art, and Isabel Löfgren, Södertörns University.

Joana Pimenta

Joana Pimenta is a filmmaker from Protugal. Her latest film, “An Aviation Field”, premiered in competition at the 69^th Locarno Film Festival, and was screened in the Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Rotterdam, CPH:Dox, Rencontres Internationales, Oberhausen, Valdivia, Mar del Plata, Edinburgh, among others, and received the Jury Award for best film in competition at Zinebi ’58. Joana has a PhD in Film and Visual studies and Critical Media Practice from Harvard University, where she currently teaches filmmaking and is Intern Director of the Film Study Center and a filmmaker associated with the Sensory Ethnography Lab.

Adirley Queirós

Adirley Queirós is a filmmaker from Brazil. His latest films are One it was Brasilia (2017), which premiered at the 70th Locarno Film Festival where it received the Special Mention Signs of Life, and White Out Black In (2014) which was widely screened and won more than 20 awards in Brazil and abroad. His work has been screened at Lincoln Center, Museum of Moving Image, the ICA in London, Pacific Film Archive, and featured in publications such as Artforum, Cinemascope, and Cahiers du Cinéma. Adirley’s films have had theatrical releases in Brazil, the U.S., the U.K., Argentina, and Portugal, among other countries, and are currently screening in the Criterion Collection channel.
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