Ana Vaz: Excavations

Ana Vaz returns to her genesis' through the reconstruction marking the encounter of her parents' in 1985 in Brazil, in juxtaposition with other found footage.

A meditation and a reverie upon a city at once real and imagined. A requiem for a city dreamt between its past and present.

Ana Vaz draws parallels between the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region and the Brazilian State of Minas Gerais, both marked by three centuries of mining.

The film departs from the collective visual memory made from over 3000 drawings made by the Waimiri-Atroari, a native people from Brazil.

Taking its title from the poem by Wallace Stevens 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird is composed of a series of attempts of looking and being looked at.

A diachronic tale of looking and becoming. As in a game, as in a chase, the film errs between character and land, land and character, predator and prey.

A film-poem of an ecology of signs tracing a colonial history repeating itself: celebration and power relations, objects and fetishes, roots and branches.