Fordlandia Malaise is a film about the memory and present of Fordlandia, the company town founded by Henry Ford in the Amazon rain forest in 1928 to produce rubber for U.S. car production. Nowadays, Fordlandia is a space suspended between times (20th and 21st centuries), between utopia and dystopia, between visibility and invisibility: steel and glass buildings remain in use while traces of indigenous life leave no marks on the ground. Giving voice to the inhabitants who claim the right to write their own story, the film blends together archival imagery, drone footage, tales, myths and songs.
Susana de Sousa Dias‘s work explores the dialectics of history and memory, questioning established regimes of visibility and audibility with a focus on the archive. Her films have been exhibited worldwide at festivals, art exhibitions and venues such as Documenta 14, PhotoEspaña, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Harvard Film Archive, Museum of Contemporary Art of Ceará (Brasil), National Museum of Contemporary Art (Lisbon), Arsenal Institut, Centre Pompidou (Paris), Visions du Réel, IDFA, and Berlinale-Berlin International Film Festival where Fordlandia Malaise world premiered in 2019. She has received several awards, including the Grand Prix Cinéma du Réel, and directed two editions of the International Film Festival Doclisboa in 2012 and 2013.
Presented by the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies
School of Media Studies
The New School
https://newschooldocstudies.wordpress.com/
http://www.newschool.edu/public-engagement/documentary-media-graduate-certificate/
The New School Doc Studies 