Dry Ground Burning

Sis­ters are doing it for them­selves – that is, hijack­ing an under­ground pipeline, run­ning a makeshift oil refin­ery, and sell­ing gaso­line on the black mar­ket to redis­trib­ute wealth to their com­mu­ni­ty in Sol Nascente, one of the biggest fave­las in South America.

This is Brazil under the hos­tile admin­is­tra­tion of far-right pres­i­dent Jair Bol­sonaro, a coun­try marked by tremen­dous polit­i­cal polar­i­sa­tion, eco­nom­ic tur­moil, and acute social dis­par­i­ty. It sees Léa (Léa Alves da Sil­va) join forces with her half-sis­ter Chi­tara (Joana Darc Fur­ta­do), the resource­ful and
tac­i­turn leader of a ring of gasolineras.

They play fic­tion­alised exten­sions of their real selves, and their riv­et­ing screen pres­ence lies at the cen­tre of Queirós and Pimenta’s docu-fic­tion hybrid. Long takes, dis­cur­sive mono­logues, slow pans and styl­is­tic shifts allow the direc­tors to forge an inven­tive cin­e­mat­ic lan­guage out of polit­i­cal con­scious­ness; one that eschews the nar­ra­tive codes of West­ern cin­e­ma, as it blends fic­tion and doc­u­men­tary, immer­sion and obser­va­tion, to pro­vide a mul­ti­lay­ered embod­i­ment of mar­gin­alised wom­an­hood in con­tem­po­rary Brazil.

An aur­al fab­ric of grow­ing agi­ta­tion gains for­ti­tude from the coarse­ly tex­tured sounds of oxi­dised machin­ery, explo­sions and the dron­ing motor­cy­cles of the work­ing-class moto­queiros (bik­er boys). These are the caus­tic instru­ments of an orches­tra of resis­tance, ​“like dry ground burn­ing, blaz­ing, explod­ing, with
emo­tion, fire, desire and passion”.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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