A árvore

In October of 2018, a year of overwhelming political, personal, and existential transformations, I decided to start filming a diary. I wanted to free myself from cinematographic practice as a constant exercise of projection and representation, and find a living cinema that would reflect the extraordinary quotidian side of life, with everything that usually remains on the sidelines, on the edges of a film. Without scripts, without projections, the camera would become an accomplice to some moments of life that would remain stored on celluloid until the day they would be revealed—a kind of metabolism of the image, where the practice of filming would be nothing more than a vital metabolic exercise. The images would thus become a mere capture of energies—spectral, historical, emotional—in the form of visual representations.
A ÁROVRE is a ritual-film about my father—the artist, musician, and mystic of the forest—Guilherme Vaz, a man who lived and reflected on the frontier, on the fatal advance of modernity over the peoples of the earth, a man who wrote music instinctively, who thought of cinema as his “spiritual father” and, above all, whose lived life was his greatest work. (Ana Vaz)

Production Ana Vaz. Production companies Azkuna Zentroa (Bilbao, Spain), Ana Vaz (Brazil). Director Ana Vaz. Cinematography Ana Vaz. Editing Ana Vaz, Deborah Viegas. Music Guilherme Vaz. Sound design Ana Vaz. With Guilherme Vaz, Ana Vaz.

Ana Vaz is an artist and filmmaker born in Brasília. Her films activate and question cinema as an art of the (in)visible and instrument capable of dehumanizing the human, expanding its connections with forms of life—other than human or spectral. Consequences or expansion of her cinematography, her activities are also embodied in writing, critical pedagogy, installations or collective walks. Her films have been screened at several film festivals. Recent exhibitions of her work include a solo show at Jeu de Paume, Paris; Pivô, São Paulo; and Escola das Artes, Porto. After APIYEMIYEKÎ? (2019) and 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD (2020) this is her third participation with Forum Expanded.

Films: 2007: Sacris Pulso (15 min.). 2012: Entre temps (12 min.), Les mains, negatives (with Julien Creuzet, 15 min.). 2013: A idade da pedra (30 min.). 2014: Occidente (15 min.). 2015: A Film, Reclaimed (with Tristan Bera, 19 Min.). 2016: Ha terra! (12 min.), Amérika: Bahía de las flechas (8 min.). 2018: Olhe bem as montanhas (30 min.), Amazing Fantasy (3 min.), Atomic Garden (8 min.). 2019: Apiyemiyekî? (28 min., Forum Expanded 2020). 2020: Pseudosphynx (9 min.), 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (32 min., Forum Expanded 2021), Pseudosphynx (8 min.). 2022: É Noite na América (66 min.), A árvore / The Tree.