O ESTRANHO (The Intrusion) is set in a place—Guarulhos International Airport near São Paulo. Actually, is that true? The French social scientist Marc Augé once argued that airports were exactly the opposite: non-places. He likened them to shopping malls, bus depots, parking lots—pseudo places more functional than social, used rather than inhabited, fundamentally transient and impersonal. Airports, he believed, exemplified ‘supermodernity’, a cultural malady engineered by capitalism and technology, in which our relationship to space and time is bent out of shape. Do they make us feel jet-set, vivified? Or, moving through these strange landscapes, do we experience something closer to loneliness?
Such rueful speculations would mystify those advocates—developers, architects, engineers, economists, politicians, change-makers, proselytisers of globalization—who see airports as symbols of progress, as opportunities for second or third-tier nations to rebrand themselves. In 2006, Brazil, from which filmmakers Flora Dias and Juruna Mallon hail, formally joined “the BRICS” (an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), a group designed to advertise their collective status as home to rapidly-expanding and heavy-spending middle classes, as suppliers of raw and often rare materials, as key nodes in the atlas of international finance. Airports—for Brazil, for the BRICS—were declarations: the local is now parochial. Also: that which was can no longer be.
An instantly summoned village
Airports promote speed, luxury, convenience. They aspire to be brands. They hope to be associated with fun, freedom, mobility, success. Connected to—but also detached from—the regions in which they’re located, they are meticulously fabricated cultural artefacts whose strangeness is captured in a 1997 essay by J.G. Ballard; the modern airport, he wrote, is “an instantly summoned village whose life span is long enough to calm us and short enough not to be a burden. The terminal concourses are the ramblas and agoras of the future city, time-free zones where all the clocks of the world are displayed, an atlas of arrivals and destinations forever updating itself, where briefly we become true world citizens.”
What is the place in O ESTRANHO? It’s not the departures and arrivals hall. That’s where so many airport dramas occur—thrillers where cunning operatives use fake documents to bypass security, romantic comedies such as LOVE ACTUALLY, where star-crossed lovers kiss and cry. But Dias and Mallon aren’t interested in travellers or in tourists. Or even in Guarulhos as an international locus. (In recent months, well over a hundred Afghan migrants fleeing the Taliban have made makeshift homes there.) Those types of people are mere backdrops here, shot at knee level, less vivid than their trainers or branded suitcases.
We are prompted to think of airports not solely as places of ascension and escape, but as conflict zones.
Airports need signage, clarity, directions. Dias and Mallon prefer to explore the thresholds of visibility. They gravitate towards terra vague—perimeter fences, hangars, logistics warehouses, car parks. They show workers who have suffered industrial accidents, whose contracts are about to expire, who can’t afford the liquors or tech equipment in Duty Free. These workers are often shown looking away from camera, lost in thought, in deep reverie. Are they raging against low pay? Contemplating escape? If they’re dreaming, what are their dreams? About who, about when?
Guarulhos is, in effect, a burial site. It is situated on Indigenous land. Its concrete halls and runways are built on what used to be villages, trees, rich nature. Women speak of farms, guava, chickens running freely, riverine memories. They cannot forget—vow not to forget—old rituals. Dances and cleansings. Smoking and swaying. They talk of “the forest as cure”. Of nature’s “embrace”. That world—of ancestors, of culture as connective tissue—has been violated both by the airport and by the values it enshrines. Now the ancient waters have been poisoned. The air is carboniferous.
Heard and felt
Sound is at the heart of O ESTRANHO. The film is quiet. It asks us to move closer, to listen deeply. Water, birds, insects, breezes, branches swaying, human breath: here is a vital thrum. Later: chants and rhythms, songs as spirits. They’re antidotes to the roar of engines (engines that suck in and roast flying geese), container trucks, the canned euphoria within the terminals. These are not sounds, but noises. Noises that drown out others. They represent the acoustics of ecocide.
Airports are full of time displays. Of passengers scrambling to get to their gates. Of food-court workers scurrying to complete customer orders. Of baggage handlers risking throwing out their backs to empty carousels as quickly as possible. This is punitive time—machinic, industrial. Dias and Mallon though are thirsting for something else. They begin the film with a series of miniatures—from 1590, 1932, 1893, 1677, 1492: individuals on horses, lying on rocks, naked by streams. Here time is non-linear, mysterious, associative, multi-chambered. Later, there are close-ups of flowers and leaves, of moist geology. Nature, however assaulted, has its own cycles, its own powers of resistance.
Airports can be seen as temples to morbid modernity. Christopher Schaberg, more optimistically, views them as “critical spaces where we might learn how to coexist on this planet”. Between these two positions is where O ESTRANHO hovers. We are encouraged to speculate about the people on screen: are they actors, non-professionals, documentary subjects? We are asked to be attentive to who or what is not on screen—dead parents, ancient tribes, old pathways, submerged strata. We are prompted to think of airports not solely as places of ascension and escape, but as conflict zones. Battles fought in the past and, of necessity, in the future.
Sukhdev Sandhu directs the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at New York University.
