2019-2020
Ana Vaz (Brazil) studied at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Le Fresnoy. She was also a member of the SPEAP (Sciences Po, École des Arts Politiques) conceived and directed by Bruno Latour. Her film and digital artworks have been exhibited at Tate Modern, Palais de Tokyo, Jeu de Paume, Curtas Vila do Conde, Visions du Réel (Nyon), NYFF, and five previous editions of Media City Film Festival. She is a recipient of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Kazuko Trust Award, Media City Film Festival and Fronteira Festival (Goiânia) Grand Prizes (2015). She is also a founding member of the collective COYOTE with Tristan Bera, Nuno da Luz, Elida Hoëg and Clémence Seurat, a cross-disciplinary group working in the fields of ecology, ethnology and political science. Vaz is a 2020 Sundance Film Institute Nonfiction Grantee.
Brazilian filmmaker Ana Vaz makes films rich in beauty and political attentiveness, engaging with the ghosts of colonialism and modernity that infuse both her country and the rest of the Americas. Her first film Sacris Pulso uses a film version of Clarice Lispector’s vision of Brasília, Brasiliários, as source material to create an inter-temporal family voyage into the Oscar Niemeyer-designed city; the capital is referenced again in The Age of Stone, which travels to western Brazil and places an entropic structure into fraught conversation with Niemeyer’s original designs. In Occidente, Vaz voyages to Portugal to delve into a history of colonialism, but instead sees its struggles being re-performed in everyday interactions; There is Land returns home, exploring the backcountry to investigate the notion of land ownership in a country as vast as Brazil. Finally, America: Bay of Arrows takes us to a site of first contact, where Christopher Columbus was confronted by the indigenous Taíno — a foundational and formative challenge to a nascent colonialism. –TIFF
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