It Is Night in America (2022)
Ana Vaz
It Is Night in America, Ana Vaz, Brazil/Italy/France, 16mm > digital, 66 min, 2022
It Is Night in America is a film recorded at Brasília Zoo, a habitat of hundreds of rescued species in the city. Giant anteaters, maned wolves, owls, wood foxes, capybaras, and caracaras meet with biologists, veterinarians, caretakers, and the environmental police in a sombre plot where the challenges of preserving life weave a web of intersecting perspectives. In the end, who are the real captives?
Midnight blue. The creatures return to the city. They nest in the parking lots. They glorify the inhabitants’ garbage in a nocturnal feast that escapes the tyranny of the sun, the monuments, the roads, the edifications. An animalistic spell cast against the empire of death in the dead of the American night: time that turns day into night. Also time for the creature-cinema that tries to accompany the carcass of a dead anteater through its own skin of expired film, on its way to extinction. Analogue skin shedding the end of a century marked by the trait which best characterizes it: garbage. Analogue garbage redeemed as a testament to this fauna fleeing extinction.
Streaming Details
This film is available to stream globally.
Program Partners
This film is co-presented with Spectacle Theater and Cinema Lamont.
Image credits: all artworks, portraits, and stills courtesy the artist © Ana Vaz.
About the artist
Ana Vaz (Brazil) is an artist, filmmaker, and writer born in Brasília in 1986. Her films, installations, and performed texts explore complex environments, territories, and hybrid histories, offering critical reflections on the relationship between colonialism, modernity, and impending ecological disaster. She received an MA in Cinema and Visual Arts from Le Fresnoy – studio national des arts contemporain (2013) and completed postgraduate studies at École nationale supérieure des beaux arts de Lyon (2014). She has completed nearly 20 films since 2007, which have been exhibited widely at festivals, museums, and galleries worldwide, including Tate Modern, Palais de Tokyo, Jeu de Paume, Curtas Vila do Conde, Visions du Réel, New York Film Festival, CPH:DOX, Flaherty Seminar, Toronto International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Matadero Madrid, Cinémathèque royale de Belgique, Gulbenkian Foundation, Vdrome, and five previous editions of Media City Film Festival. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Kazuko Trust Award from Film Society of Lincoln Center and Grand Prizes from Media City Film Festival, Fronteira Festival, Cinéma du Réel, Punto de Vista Festival, and 25FPS. Vaz is also a founding member of the collective COYOTE, a cross-disciplinary group working in the fields of ecology, ethnology, and political science. She was an MCFF Chrysalis Fellow (2019–2020) and Sundance Film Institute Nonfiction Grantee (2020). She currently lives and works between Lisbon, Portugal, and Paris, France.