Adirley Queirós
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Trailer Watch: Adirley Queirós and Joana Pimenta’s Dry Ground Burning
Another trailer drops today for a film featured in our most recent issue, this time for the docu-fiction hybrid Dry Ground Burning from directors Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós. This is the first film that Pimenta and Queirós have co-directed together, but the duo previously collaborated on Queirós’s 2017 film Once There Was Brasilia, which employed Pimenta as the cinematographer. Vadim Rizov wrote about the film during TIFF back in September: The plot revolves around two half-sisters who get involved in manufacturing and distributing gas illegally, and its title is a description, not a metaphor—the fuel’s potency is demonstrated to […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 5, 2023 -
The Future Is Burning: Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós on Dry Ground Burning
Beginning with 2011’s Is the City Only One?, Brazilian filmmaker Adirley Queirós has considered the history of his hometown of Ceilândia in sci-fi and western-inflected narratives made in close collaboration with nonprofessional performers. Dry Ground Burning, co-directed by the former soccer player-turned-filmmaker with Joana Pimenta (the DP of his 2017 Once There Was Brasilia), was shot over 18 months and took two years of post-production to complete, and that labor shows in the most expansive and ambitious of these films yet, each of which builds on and echoes its predecessors. Is the City Only One? foregrounds the experiences of workers […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 16, 2023 -
Berlinale 2022 Critic’s Notebook: Queens of the Qing Dynasty, Dry Ground Burning, Rewind and Play, Camouflage, Happer’s Comet, The Middle Ages
My favorite film of the Berlinale was Queens of the Qing Dynasty, Ashley McKenzie’s ambitious and otherworldly fantasia about a “queer friendship romance” between a suicidal young woman and a Chinese immigrant she meets while hospitalized. Inspired by two teenagers she befriended during the casting of her previous feature, Werewolf (2016), McKenzie first sketched out the central character, Star (Sarah Walker), whose everyday life is mediated by endless negotiations with social workers, doctors, guardians, landlords and the various bureaucracies that employ them. Star is aging out of child protective services and has been deemed unfit to live independently, so as […]
by Darren Hughes on Mar 22, 2022 -
Our Stories are True: Porto/Post/Doc 2017
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” opens William Gibson’s Neuromancer, set in Chiba, Japan (while generally accepted as a reference to the novelist’s home in Vancouver). A similar pall intermittently lingered over the northern Portuguese city of Porto during the city’s Porto/Post/Doc festival. The pallid grey and smoke were reminders of the devastating fires that have engulfed northern regions of the country since the summer, claiming many lives. The cinematic image of smokey cobblestone streets — with a knowledge of the real, if unseen forces behind them — provided a somber and […]
by Jesse Cumming on Dec 27, 2017 -
Dispatches from Sundance, Berlin, SXSW, True/False & Thessaloniki
Sundance SCOTT MACAULAY Check it out: the two top prize winners at Sundance this year, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack, both feature as central elements teenagers who stage and film their own versions of classic movies. There’s even overlap between the two films, although Moselle’s Manhattan shut-ins incline more towards Tarantino and Freddy Krueger, while Gomez-Rejon’s teen Pittsburgh auteurs shirk the Romero roots of their hometown for deep dives into the Criterion Collection. For film lovers of a certain age, both Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and The Wolfpack […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 28, 2015
