This Doc Talk featured a screening and Q&A with filmmaker Ana Vaz to discuss her short films Apiyemiyekî?, Amérika: Bahía de las Flechas, Ha Terra! There is Land!, Look closely at the mountains, and Atomic Garden. Following the in-person film screening, Vaz joined virtually via Zoom for the Q&A.
Vaz’s films activate and question cinema as an art of the (in)visible and instrument capable of dehumanising the human, expanding its connections with forms of life — other than human or spectral. Apiyemiyekî? addresses the genocide of the Waimiri-Atroari people in 1970s through illustrations created by the indigenous population which refer us to the present day. In present-day Dominican Republic, Amérika: Bahía de las Flechas revisits Lake Enriquillo where Christopher Columbus landed in 1492 and confronted the native Taíno people to establish the first European settlement in America. Há Terra! is set in the Brazilian bush where land and character, predator and prey encounter one another in a chase, a hunt, and a tale of looking and becoming. Look closely at the mountains compares the dire mineral extraction issue in Brazil with a different outcome in Nord-Pas-de-Calais in France, where such extraction has ceased. Atomic Garden explores an elderly Japanese woman’s contaminated garden after the nuclear catastrophe of Fukushima.
Moderated by Lana Lin, Director of the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies. Co-produced with Documentary Program Associates Adriana de Lucio (Media Studies ’24) and Johann Yamin (Media Studies ’24).
Ana Vaz is an artist and filmmaker born in the Brazilian highlands. Recent film festivals include Locarno Film Festival, Cineasti del Presente (Switzerland, 2022); Berlinale, Forum Expanded (Germany, 2023, 2021, 2020); MoMA Doc Fortnight (New York, USA, 2023); CPH:Dox (Copenhagen, Denmark, 2023); IFFR (Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 2023, 2020); Viennale (Austria, 2022); Mostra Internacional de Cinema em São Paulo (Brazil, 2022); Jeonju International Film Festival (South-Korea, 2023); Indie Lisboa, International competition (Portugal, 2023). Her work has also been shown at Jeu de Paume (Paris, France), Instituto Moreira Salles (São Paulo, Brazil), Courtisane (Ghent, Belgium), Whitechapel Gallery (London, UK), TIFF Cinemathèque (Toronto, Canada), and Flaherty Film Seminar (Hamilton, USA). She is a founding member of the collective COYOTE, an interdisciplinary group working in the fields of ecology and political science through an array of conceptual and experimental forms.
Presented by the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies at the School of Media Studies at the Schools of Public Engagement.
The New School Doc Studies 