Cinema and Nature: Contemporary Experiments from Brazil

Cinema and Nature: Contemporary Experiments from Brazil
(05 movies – 01 feature, 04 shorts)
Wilson Oliveira Filho and Oksana Chefranova

A festival of Brazilian experimental films that engage with the concept of nature within the context of the Anthropocene era. These include poetic essays, documentaries, and an AI-generated film. In contemporary discourse, the intersection of art and nature is increasingly significant. Cinema, as a medium, serves as a critical conduit for understanding both the world and the subject, while also facilitating the exploration of emerging cosmologies. Films that do not merely depict nature as a backdrop; rather, they emphasize the notion that media can be conceptualized as an environment — an essential tool for humanity's existential reflection. As Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media theorist, suggested in his 1966 address, "the experimental artist is always constructing models of future situations that provide reliable headlights for social navigation."

Feature film

1- “Lavra” (Ironland), 2021 - By Lucas Bambozzi

A hybrid documentary that addresses the impacts of mining on the landscape of Minas Gerais. The film follows a fictional character interacting with real people and situations through the journey of geographer Camila, an emigrant from Governador Valadares. Played by Camila Mota, an actress from Teatro Oficina, she returns from the United States to her hometown when the Doce River was contaminated by the rupture of the Fundão dam in Mariana.

Four Brazilian Shorts

1- “Um jardim singular”, A singular garden, 2017 - By Monica Klemz

An experimental short documentary that explores the uniqueness of an urban and historic garden in the large metropolis of Rio de Janeiro. The relationship of a historical and urban garden, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, with the people that transit through it, in a space-time crossing. Monica Klemz debut film essay.

2- “Obsolescência desprogramada” Deplanned Obsolescence, 2019 - by DUO2x4 (Wilson Oliveira Filho and Márcia Bessa)

Made as part of a videoinstallation entitled iBroke – a reference to iPads an iPhones –, this experimental short tries to bond natural concerns, media ecologies and found objects to create a contemporary city symphony in the Anthropocene era.

3- “Nuclear emulsion”, 2013 - By Duo Strangloscope

Intersections between nature, painting, photography and cinema in search of a poetic that expresses the passage of time that sculpturally immobilizes in the petrification of the human as landscape. Body fragment. Body landscape. Stone. Thinking about how the materiality of the grain (real, physical) impresses on the immateriality of the digital (binary) image.

4- “Somos: THE CREATION OF YBIRÁ-UBUNTU”, 2025 - By Ricardo Palmirei

In the deep flow of time, a shaman walks through the dense forest, carrying the ancestral wisdom of his people. Between roots and shadows, he encounters Ybirá-Ubuntu, an entity that emerges from the earth as the guardian of the lost balance. Together, they observe the passage of the Anthropocene – an era in which WE ARE the ones leveraging natural processes, pushing the planet towards exhaustion. Between unbridled expansion and devastation, we witness the completed transition to total desertification of the world. But what now? Is there still hope of saving ourselves?