To Brasil (2023)
Ute Aurand
To Brasil, Ute Aurand, Germany, 16mm > digital, 18.5 min, 2023
Ute Aurand visits São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro for the first time. A handheld 16mm camera moves with her, observing her transient encounters with orchids, cats, bookshops, museums, capoeira players, hills, sand beaches, and friends. The journey is recorded with a joyful lack of hierarchy, in a manner which honours the experiences and memories of every encounter. A beautiful, meditative manifestation of the feminist gaze.—Hyun Jin Cho
[Aurand’s] work builds out from fragments, detours, refrains, and returns; her camera picks up discarded gestures and suspends them in time. Films are always moving, always fleeting, her work reminds us. These qualities are as fundamental to lived experience as they are to the cinema. Throughout Ute Aurand’s work we encounter a world animated by her mobile and dynamic camera, following, chasing, leading, and dissecting space.—George Clark
Streaming Details
THis film is available to stream globally.
Program Partners
This film is co-presented with Common Ground Gallery and Open City Documentary Festival.
Image credits: all artworks, portraits and stills courtesy of the artist © Ute Aurand.
About the artist
Ute Aurand (Germany) is a filmmaker and film curator born in Frankfurt am Main in 1957. She is one of the most significant filmmakers working in the traditions of film diary and portraiture today. According to the artist, “The source of inspiration is daily life, the fountain which never stops and offers itself to everyone. It is a great joy and challenge to transform my inner dialogue into film.” Aurand graduated from the German Film and Television Academy in 1985. She has completed more than 40 films since then, which have been widely exhibited in museums, galleries, and festivals internationally, including Tate Modern, Austrian Film Museum, New York Film Festival, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Anthology Film Archives, Harvard Film Archive, Pacific Film Archive, International Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Courtisane Festival, National Gallery of Art (Washington), International Film Festival Rotterdam, Punto de Vista Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, and eight previous editions of Media City Film Festival. She was awarded MCFF’s Grand Prize in 2008. Aurand has taught at the HFBK University of Fine Arts Hamburg, University of the Arts Bremen, and Zürich University of the Arts. She is a subject of the monograph Ute Aurand, Helga Fanderl, Jeannette Muñoz, Renate Sami, published by Punto de Vista Festival to coincide with major surveys of the artists’ work (2020). She co-founded and programmed for the screening collective FilmSamstag from 1997–2007, organizing several retrospectives with a particular focus on female filmmakers such as Marie Menken, Margaret Tait, Maria Lang, and Utako Koguchi, among others. She lives and works in Berlin, Germany.