Há terra Ana Vaz, 2016

As in a game, as in a chase, the film errs between character and land, land and character, predator and prey. This is how Ana Vaz describes her 16mm cinepoem. Darting camera movements appear to chase a young maroon girl through the high grass. The presenttense voiceover seems to fuse with the past in the myopia of the long focus lens. The recurrent sound loop of a man shouting Land Land conjures up the distant memory of colonialism. But the beauty of this collage rests on the impossibility for the spectator to let this past pass: soon the current testimony involves a mayor who has taken over by threat the lands of the indigenous people. The young girl being hunted comes to personify a territory. We are in Brazils sertão, where the cry há terra (literally: there is land) can also be heard as asserting that there is no reason for the landless or havenots whose organised Movement is now some forty years old to be deprived of land.