Ana Vaz
É Noite na América (It is Night in America)
Ana Vaz describes her film É Noite na América (It is Night in America) as an eco-terror tale, freely inspired by A cosmopolitics of animals by Brazilian philosopher Juliana Fausto; in which she investigates the political life of non-human beings and questions the modern idea of the exceptionality of the human species. In parallel to the feature film version, Vaz created a three-channel installation format meant to be displayed in contemporary art spaces. This edition includes three complementary video works that expand on the conceptual frameworks of the film.
To shape her filmic argument the artist carried on an epistolary communication with Juliana Fausto, later edited into two short films accompanying the installation version, along with a series of images of the construction of the zoo of Brasilia, in the mid-60s, and an important character in the film. Oddly enough, the city’s zoo was ready before the planned town was erected so that workers could be entertained by animals brought in while displacing the local fauna with concrete mixers and backhoe loaders. With this in mind, Vaz’s non-linear plot follows the paths and detours of wild animals—fugitives (or refugees as one the interviewed zookeeper describes them) from the destruction of their natural habitat—in the middle of modern Brasília.
The work was shot using a Day-for-Night technique (used to simulate a night scene while shooting in daylight) and with expired 16mm film stocks between São Paulo and Brasilia, Brazil. Day-for-Night shootings were often used in the early days of filmmaking, reaching its peak during the heyday of the Western genre. Vaz’s take on the technical aspects of her films has the same conceptual rigor as her sounds and images. The choice for the expired film stocks and the nod to the infamous genre that profited a great deal from spectacularizing colonialist settlements in North America is not random. With this, she calls attention to the precarious state in which the portrayed animals live and how this is a direct consequence of that specific land being a staging ground for Brazil’s ongoing colonialist drama, culminating in the current corporatized neo-colonialism that has destroyed complex ecosystems throughout the country.
É Noite na América (It is Night in America) was commissioned by Fondazione in Between Art and Film and Pivô and premiered in the last Locarno Film Festival, where it was granted with a special mention “The Green Leopard” on films mindful of ecological issues and the Boccalino d’Oro prize for best editing.