Há terra!

In the depths of the Brazilian west, the endemic sertão, a place that is as much physical as it is mental, a refuge and a place of no return, a past history unfolds  in an imperfect present as an encounter, as a confrontation. In this place, where land is arid, scarce and marked by a history of colonial oligarchies, extractivism and monocultural agribusiness, the question of distribution and attainment persists.

 

Here, maroon communities made alliance with native Amerindians to survive and hence formed the Kalunga[1] people, who still prevail in parts of Goiás[2]. These quasi-maroon communities of resistance and communitarianism date from the period of the colonial rule of the 18th century, but are still alive today in diverse and contemporary reconfigurations. In the contemporary history of the region, it is mostly alive through the struggles of the Landless Workers Movement (MST), who fight for the right to land distribution across the country.

 

Há Terra! [There is Land!] is hence marked by an encounter which confirms this history in the present. The film re-visits the setting and central protagonist of an earlier film I made in 2013, A Idade da Pedra [The Stone Age]. The making of Há Terra! follows a search for A Idade da Pedra’s protagonist and seer, Ivonete dos Santos Moraes. As I set myself to find her in her old address, in the depths of the cerrado in Goiás, I finally found her living in a settlement defended and organized by the MST movement.

 

Both search and meeting become a motif for the film. As she hides in her refuge, our encounter offers an escape, a perspective, a reflection. Há Terra! moves in and with its character and setting as a ritual, where both land and character are in constant interplay, one becoming the other. At once hunter and hunted, this interplay pays ode to the anthropophagic appetite: “Anthropophagy, absorption of the sacred enemy to transform him into a totem, the human adventure, the earthly aim”[3].

 

Há Terra! is an encounter, a hunt, a diachronic tale of looking and becoming. As in a chase, as in a shoot, the film errs between character and land, land and character, predator and prey. The film is split between the wild cerrado and its modern neighbor, Brasília, a mirror of the modern project of scrutinizing, civilizing and organizing the wilderness as something to be tamed, to be attained. Experience becomes catalogued motifs, ethnicities become categories, amulets become fetish, the modern syndrome: the most it destroys, the most it preserves. Between west and far west, the film compares, contrasts and interposes perspectives, layers and agencies. Believing in the force of this encounter, the film engages in a reciprocal anthropology, a bodily becoming, a savage and civil chase.

 

[1] In the Brazilian west, maroon settlements allied with native Indians. The Kalungas descend from the slaves who resisted and escaped to the hinterlands, where many founded hybrid communities to survive the arid conditions.

[2] Goiás is a Brazilian state in the backlands marked by the second colonial period, which is characterized by mining and monofarming activities, mostly cattle. It is also the state in which the country's modernist capital, Brasília, was built.

[3] The Anthropophagic Manifesto, Oswald de Andrade (1928).

 

Ana Vaz​ in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (August 2017)