DA Films, in partnership with the Sheffield DocFest 2021, is presenting a retrospective of Colombian-Brazilian filmmaker Paula Gaitán, whose body of work is one of the most radical and uncompromising to appear in Latin America in the last 30 years.
Untitled “Paula Gaitán: Acid Portraits,” and curated by Juliano Gomes and Christopher Small, members of the Selection Committee at Sheffield DocFest, the retrospective will stream for free, previous registration, five films by Gaitán.
According to the curatorial notes, “Gaitán’s films are ever in the present tense, ever occupied by the forceful movement of a human body in and through a space; a background in poetry and the visual arts seemingly setting the stage for a performative, mutant, and highly material cinema. In this mini retrospective, we find first four and later five very different portraits of individuals and collectives, minds and bodies, each of the portraits characterized by a formal restlessness that we find consistently in Gaitán’s work.”
Four films by Gaitán, Uaká (1988), Days in Sintra (2007), Night Box (2015), and Subtle Interferences (2017), will stream between Friday, May 28 and Thursday, June 4, and Riverock / É Rocha e Rio, Negro Leo (2020) will stream on June 14, following its Sheffield DocFest premiere.
In a newly restored version, Uaká is a kind of experimental ethnography that delves into the Takumã indigenous universe—in the Xingu region of Brazil—with a material, dreamlike and sensual intensity untypical of films with an apparent similarity to it. Gaitán's films and her extreme sensitivity to the contours and movements of bodies, objects and, in turn, of her own images, appears fully formed in this early classic about the Takumã universe.
Days in Sintra narrativizes the absence of filmmaker Glauber Rocha, Paula's ex-partner, in the Portuguese city where they once lived. Paula conceives images of Rocha own photos, where both his simultaneous presence and absence seemingly spreads through the details of each shot. Here and elsewhere, Gaitán’s cinema prefers flurries of minor sensations to studious constructions and transmissions of information and elucidation.
Hers is a tactile and sensual cinema, exemplified perhaps above all by Night Box and Subtle Interferences. Here Gaitán, in two alternative portraits of musicians – and also artists, dancers, and performers—further refines the sonic quality of her films, taking direct responsibility herself for the sound editing and cinematography. Each are immersive experiences in the most extreme and literal sense of the word.
Riverrock, an intimate, epic encounter with sociologist and musician Negro Leo. This essentially 157-minute monologue by Leo that navigates a veritable ocean of ideas and asides on Brazilian culture, politics, and on his own life and work is punctuated too by moments of overwhelming sensuality: music, dance, sniffing, sneezing, blunt camera movements and reframings, and the most elemental kind of voice performance.
For more information and to watch the films visit www.dafilms.com/.
