Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Emerging from a regular and spontaneous practice of film, A Árvore is an encounter with and an homage to the filmmaker’s father Guilherme Vaz (1948-2018). Major Brazilian artist, composer, experimental musician and maestro, as well as one of the pioneers of conceptual and sound art in Brazil, his compositions often traverse the filmography of Ana Vaz in a constant dialogue between music, sound and place. Guilherme Vaz’s work is marked by his experience living at the recently inaugurated Brasília, where Ana was born, as well as the many years spent collaborating with remote indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon. A Árvore is a ghostly ritual woven through the fragments of a recorded conversation between father and daughter transposed to various significant geographies in life lines of both.

Ana Vaz (1986, Brazil) is an artist and filmmaker who works with cinema as an instrument. Her films, or rather her film-poems, travel through territories and events haunted by the perennial consequences of internal and external forms of colonialism, and their footprints on the earth as well as on human and different from human forms. Her practice can also take the shape of writing, critical pedagogy, installations, film programs or ephemeral events, which are expansions or developments of her films. Her works have been presented at film festivals, seminars and institutions such as Locarno Film Festival – Cineasti del presente; Berlinale Forum Expanded; IFFR, Rotterdam; Viennale; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Pivô, São Paulo; Jeu de Paume, Paris; CPH:Dox; New York Film Festival – Projections; TIFF Wavelengths, Toronto; BFI, London; Cinéma du Réel, Paris; Tate Modern, London; LUX Moving Images, London; Tabakalera, San Sebastián; Whitechapel Gallery, London; MAM Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo; Matadero, Madrid; Jameel Arts Center, Dubai; Mostra de Cinema de São Paulo; Savvy Contemporary, Berlin; among others. She is a recipient of the Sundance Film Institute Nonfiction Grant (2019), the Film Society of Lincoln Center Kazuko Trust Award (2015), as well as grand prizes at Festival dei Popoli (2022), Entrevues Belfort (2022), FIDOCS (2022), Punto de Vista (2020), 25FPS (2020), Cinéma du Réel (2016), Media City Film Festival (2015), Fronteira Experimental and Documentary Film Festival (2015). Ana Vaz is also a founding member of the COYOTE collective, an interdisciplinary group working between ecology and political science through conceptual and experimental formats.