Luís Fernando Moura

This piece of filmmaking also used later for another (and way longer) film, Jubilee (1978), could be placed on a list of films that have discovered the world viewed, just like the Lumière Brothers', even if it was shot 80 years later. This may remind us how the underground artists keep discovering and occasionally find themselves a different enlightenment in dissent. From elsewhere there will always be one more way to stun anyone who sees.

The rise of indigenous filmmaking in different parts of the world will eventually materialize in exquisite experiences of the world we see and sense, like what we cross paths with here. A way of collective filmmaking within the frame of a cosmovision of then outsiders (here, the Maxakali one) that turns into film and burns whatever references to rely on, and where we therefore discover ourselves living the flow of mysterious phenomena. Is this a play or is this life? What is this camera doing?

The discovery of film as a direct tool — with eyes and ears — has its finest, most luminous moments when it comes from plain honesty, interest and truth. It may simply be a story of one who wants, or even needs, to discover, meet, listen and understand.

The encounter between film and the fight for worldwide liberation has its very own rich history. A forceful Haile Gerima summons up a picture, a figure, an icon. It shall be lived as a dream, or perhaps a nightmare, and still it will never lack brightness, luminosity, lucidity. Behind the bars one will find the stage for the mastermind. This comes and goes as something to stay forever, both for the struggling communities and for one's imagination.

Darkness, a moving object, subjects, something that burns up. It's like describing the basics of the world, or also the basics of the moving image. Needless to say cinema is not dead and never was, but sometimes we remember that we didn't know (again) what cinema was, until we (once again) knew. There is always a next way to meet transcendence without ever leaving the ground.

Making cinema is also a way to address letters, and there may be thousands and thousands of short films that are meant to be letters somehow. This one is a masterful love letter, a letter from someone who does know what they should do with a letter: it needs cinema, it understands cinema and what cinema can do and should do, it loves cinema, so — seemingly effortless, just like one does as they truly love — it manages to be all about love and, we could say, it is itself a film and also what one would call love. Maybe we have found love (and film) after all.

The voice says: “The opposite of the bourgeois is not the proletarian, but the bohemian”. Spread all over the world there will have been artists rolling film as envisionments of counterculture, that is, as sharp takes on the picturing of the common time that will always tell a different story, remaining as proof that lively spirits inhabit the timeline and leave strange outputs of a reenchanting gaze. Creatures like vampires are feeding various streams apart from the main one, and their power to reinterpret and reexpress culture also nourishes the history-driven fantasy of outcasts.