DRY MATO IN CHAMAS – 8 points
Brazil/Portugal, 2022
Direction and script: Adirley Queiros and Joana Pimenta.
Duration: 153 minutes.
Performers: Debora Alencar, Lea Alves da Silva, Gleide Firmino, Joana Darc Furtado, Andreia Vieira.
Premiere exclusively at CineArte Cacodelphia (Diagonal Norte 1150).
It is not strange, coming from who comes from: the Brazilian Adirley Queirós is one of the Latin American filmmakers more original at a formal level and more transparent in political terms. Therefore, it is not surprising that his latest film –co-directed with newcomer Joana Pimenta, Portuguese visual artist and filmmaker– it explodes on the screen like a Molotov cocktail with energetic capacities and reverberations that should not be measured with the usual cinematographic instruments.
As in his previous films –particularly White goes out, black goes in and Once upon a time Brasilia– the documentary record and fiction embrace each other from the first to the last of the shots, and it is impossible, absurd to try to distinguish them. Even less, split them. However, there is nothing in Mato Seco in Chamasdespite the various fuels of origin, which does not refer to ceilândia, the satellite city of Brasília where Queirós grew up and lived all his life. More precisely to Sol Nascente, one of the most neglected peripheral areas from the city, a neighborhood that refers in a specular way to Fontaínhas de Pedro Costa.
The reference to the great Portuguese filmmaker is not accidental, since in Dry Mat… various sequences in which the intimate dialogue between the stepsisters Chitara and Léa strip memories, fears and desires, They refer in aesthetic terms, without intermediate stops, to the trilogy dedicated to the Lisbon “favela”. But Queirós and Pimenta do not imitate, rather they regurgitate shapes and tones to build something new, in a story that integrates the dystopian vision of the near future –which could well be the present– with the strict gaze of the pure and simple documentary; cinematographic genres with the social register; the ethnographic gaze with political satire.
The first sequence presents spaces and characters: a group of women over thirty, many of them ex-prostitutes, others ex-convicts, exchange gasoline cans for money with a gang of motorcycle riders, before riding the roads on their high-capacity motorcycles. Chitara, Léa, Andreia and Joana are engaged in small-scale oil exploitation in the yard of his home/refinery/bunker, resisting the constant presence of the police and other gangs.
that life in the place looks a lot like the Wild West The song that closes the film makes this clear, a Brazilian hip hop classic from the 90s. No man’s land, scorched earth, the girls, resistant to various battles, live together and move on the ground like authentic warriors. In parallel, a visit to a church or the presence of a traveling singer during a night party allows the filmmakers to record life far from the thick dark liquid that gushes from the interior of the earth. At another moment, the montage opens the chronology of the narrative with an ax to introduce a march of bolsonaristas ahead of the elections that brought the Liberal Party candidate to power in 2019. “Our flag will never be red”, is heard in the mobilization. In the «fiction» of Mato Seco in Chamasthe imaginary Party of the Prisoner People, in which the protagonists militate, it is proposed to change the rules of the political game while in the streets an authentic parapolice squad is mobilized locked in a heavily armored vehicle.
It goes without saying that the actresses who play the central roles they are not professionals but in one of the best moments of the film the fourth wall is smashed to bits: one of the protagonists reflects on camera about a fact of reality and remembers a call to Queirós to alert him about the impossibility of going ahead with the shooting plan as planned. Later, when the flames engulf the skeletal remains of the armored marauder – a literal fire that serves as a powerful symbol – this hybrid of a documentary, a futuristic tale lo-fi with nods to the saga Mad Max and rebellious and matriarchal agitprop celebrates the idea of resistance as a certain possibility, on and off screen.