Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós’s Dry Ground Burning

Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós’s Dry Ground Burning (2022)

Chitara (Joana Darc Furtado) and Léa (Léa Alves da Silva) are gasolinheiras. In Sol Nascente, a favela on the outskirts of Ceilândia, a satellite city of Brasília, the women tap into an underground pipeline, extract oil, refine it, and sell the gas to motoboys who distribute it far and wide. Alternating between a straight-up documentary mode and free-spirited dips into sci-fi, the western, and gangland drama stylings, Dry Ground Burning moves for a swift two and a half hours across “a vast canvas, in turns wistful and furious, of what life in Bolsonaro’s Brazil amounts to for those living on the periphery of the periphery,” writes Leonardo Goi at the Film Stage. The film is a “paean to the marginalized that refuses to treat them as victims and instead grants them agency and dignity.”

In Dry Ground Burning, “the future isn’t just female: it is Black, lesbian, profoundly matriarchal,” writes Ela Bittencourt in Sight and Sound. Codirectors Joana Pimenta, who teaches at Harvard and is an affiliated member of the Sensory Ethnography Lab, and Adirley Queirós, a former professional soccer player who has directed four features, “belong to a larger vanguard of inventive Brazilian directors such as Affonso Uchoa, João Dumans, Juliana Antunes, and Gustavo Vinagre, for whom formal boundaries are supple and genres forever shift, and who favor the corporeal expressivity of diverse bodies over naturalistic dramaturgy or conventional staging.”

Parts of Dry Ground Burning “vaguely resemble Pedro Costa’s Fontainhas films, in terms of their dramatic lighting and attention to filmic texture,” writes Michael Sicinski at In Review Online. “But methodologically, Queirós and Pimenta are more in line with Roberto Minervini and his reconstruction of events based on the testimonies of his subjects . . . I have never seen a film quite like Dry Ground Burning. At the same time, it often feels like multiple films in competition, different filmic approaches stitched together and, to some extent, rejecting the graft.” But for Phuong Le in the Guardian, Dry Ground Burning is “an astonishing work of survival and resilience.”

Like the woman who plays her—and like too many others in Sol Nascente—Léa is fresh out of prison. Andreia (Andreia Vieira) is the founder and leader of the Prison People Party, whose platform is aimed at empowering the incarcerated. Pimenta and Queirós actually got her on the ballot during the real-life race for district deputy, but of course, as the filmmakers tell Aily Nash in an engrossing deep dive into the making of Dry Ground Burning in the current issue of Non-Fiction, “the candidate who won the election was the police delegate, one of Bolsonaro’s men.”

Dry Ground Burning is “unsurprisingly and unambiguously anti-Bolsonaro,” notes Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov, “even if one of its more spectacular shots is a slow, skeptical circular pan from within a rally of support for him, seeking out faces in the crowd for the record—a queasy epic effect is generated from this unsavory crowd of thousands.” This was “one of the most important shots I filmed,” Pimenta tells Variety’s Emiliano Granada. She sensed that she was “face to face with the world that was coming—realizing that the important thing is not Bolsonaro, it is not the party, it is the germ of the extreme right that is there and that will continue after Bolsonaro.” Queirós adds that Brazilians now “live in a political generation that has lost a sense of shame at its cynicism, the shame of classism, homophobia, misogyny . . . on the contrary, it understands them as virtues.”

In Cinema Scope, James Lattimer notes that at one point in Dry Ground Burning, “one of the characters suddenly mentions Queirós’s name” and “turns out to be speaking to Pimenta, going on to wonder how the film can continue in the way it was planned now that another of its characters is back in prison . . . Of all the many moments of alignment between Pimenta and Queirós and their ever-evolving cast across this whole, still growing filmography, this one reveals that such cinematic endeavors are ultimately just as fragile as the people and situations they portray.”

Dry Ground Burning screens once more tonight in New York before heading to the Viennale and AFI Fest in Los Angeles.

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