FRONTEIRA - International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, since its first edition, is dedicated to the exhibition of films that resist predominant forms of cinematographic language, questioning prefabricated worldviews and offering new ways of seeing, thinking and perceiving reality. With a focus on smaller cinemas, that is, on minority traditions of cinema from documentary and experimental film, Fronteira is an event dedicated to providing a diverse international program in Brazil. The festival has presented over 500 films, including shorts, medium-length and feature films, from talented filmmakers from all over the world. With approximately 50 countries represented, Fronteira offers the public a rich selection of cinematographic works, most of which have never before been screened in Brazil.
ry's capital. The event will take place at Cine Brasília between August 29 and September 3. The program includes the Mostra Cineastas na Fronteira, which is defined as a main show because contemporary and international with works finished from 2022. There is also the Mostra Cadmo e o Dragão, focused this year only on contemporary films from the DF and marking the re-founding of Fronteira - International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival in the central plateau of Brazil.
FRONTEIRA is produced by Júpiter Filmes and Barroca Filmes with direction by Camilla Margarida, Henrique Borela, Juliane Peixoto, Marcela Borela and Rafael C. Parrode.
THE FRONTIER
The frontier, this place where we are, has been said and narrated by many. The frontier is not a conceptual abstraction, but a place multi-inhabited by agents of aesthetics, politics, production of life and health. The border is a way of understanding the occupation of Brazilian territory, as well as a form of mediation with the American historical process. The ideas are based on the work of sociologist José de Souza Martins in his work FRONTEIRA: a degradação do outro nos confins do humano. One aspect of the concept of frontier shows that in the histories of the American nation-states there is a movement of demographic expansion over territories not occupied or insufficiently occupied by capital (MARTINS, 2009, p. 133).
Are these, therefore, considered frontier places: for example, regions such as western Brazil and the Amazon, where, at certain moments in history, different temporalities and ideas met and conflicted? Yes. Martins (2009, p. 137) explains that "[...] the frontier is by no means reduced and summarized to the geographical frontier. It is the frontier of many different things: the frontier of civilization (demarcated by the barbarism that is hidden in it), the spatial frontier, the frontier of cultures and worldviews, the frontier of ethnicities, the frontier of history and the historicity of man. Above all, it is the frontier of the human". The author makes a historiography of the frontier, in the context of the humanities, and emphasizes its "contradictory diversity", marked by diverse and, at the same time, contemporary historical times. The concept designates the "front of expansion of national society over unincorporated territories", in order to present a vision of Brazilian history, marked by the advance of capitalist practices and their processes of acceleration of capital through the occupation and expropriation of land, this apparently uninhabited in the eyes of national society, but in fact, place of many indigenous ethnic groups that were being systematically expelled from their territories. That is why, for this author, American societies are still in the frontier stage - a stage of their history in which social and political relations are, in a way, marked by the movement of demographic expansion on lands not occupied or insufficiently occupied by capital (MARTINS, 2009, p. 132-133).
Such ideas, in this key, show that Goiânia and Brasília are considered "New Frontier Cities", a concept by Luiz Sérgio Duarte da Silva in his work "Brasília: modernity and periphery". He refers to this type of city built in the "middle of nowhere" as a work of the national state to occupy the territory and modernize the country. Both are "planned cities" but with different inventors at different times. Goiânia is a child of the 1930 Revolution, imagined and built by Vargas. It is itself a sign of the defeat of the rural oligarchies of the former capital Goiás Velho, due to the rise of the local liberal bourgeoisie. Brasilia, on the other hand, is both the deepening of the agricultural frontier to the north and the greatest civilizing event in the west, with all its colonizing density.
THE RE-FOUNDATION
The work of the artist Ana Flávia Marú, from her research with the saúvas ants, is the identity of this re-foundation. Ana Flávia Marú was born in Itumbiara (1992), currently lives in Goiânia. She develops works in various techniques such as painting, drawing, audiovisual, in addition to the appropriation of existing files and objects. She listens to and works with objects and beings that create gaps in the hegemonic narrative of the contemporary city. Marú is part of the research and practice group Natural History of Goyaz (Goiânia, 2019). Produced solely for the festival, the artwork was created "with the desire to imagine the Re-foundation, the path to a story with ants: the simulation of an isometric perspective of the Cine Brasília building, designed by Oscar Niemeyer and taken over by ants", explains Ana Flávia Marú.
Under the carnival song:
"Either Brazil ends with the saúva
or the saúva ends with Brazil
There are saúva in the yard
There are saúva in the fields
But where there are more saúva
is in the Federal District."
"In the heart of Goyaz, the ants were already there, before the project, before Brasília, before Goiânia, they were there, together with the emus, with the candango rats, with the human beings and other humans who inhabited, dreamed, danced, sang under the earth flayed by the monster's breath. The image I constructed was formed with sunlight, on the still greenish-tinged chemical. After six minutes under the Goiás sun I washed the paper and the blue appeared, giving contour and sharpness to the ants. The blue that gives contour to the ants is cyanotype, blue known as Prussian blue was used since Hokusai's 'Great Wave of Kanagawa', but also the uniforms of the infantry of the Prussian Army, as if there was something in the chemical structure of the color that invoked violence, a shadow, an essential taint inherited from alchemist experiments, which tore living animals apart and joined their parts into horrible chimeras (...)". Ana Flávia Marú and excerpt from the book, When we stopped understanding the world, by Benjamin Labatut.
Technique: Digital drawing and cyanotype on paper.
Art: Ana Flávia Marú @anaflaviamaru
