Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós blur fiction and documentary in their hybrid tale of Brazilian resistance, independence and survival.
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.
Published 2 Sep 2022
Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós have drawn comparisons to the cinema of Pedro Costa.
Wholly immersive but does not justify a two-and-a-half-hour runtime.
Cinema as a radical means of resistance.
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