mato seco em chamas (w&d adirley queirós, joana pimenta)

Mato Seco em Chamas, translated in English into Dry Ground Burning, is a curious blend of Ghetto Mad Max, muscular feminist filmmaking and documentary footage. Three women succeed in stealing petrol from an underground pipe, which they sell at a discount to the motoboys in their marginal barrio, situated in the hinterland on the edge of Brasilia. Two of the women, Chatara and Lea, are sisters, with Lea recently released from prison. A third, Andreia, is setting up her own political party, PPP, which could be understood as the Prisoner’s Party for the People. The trio defend their territory as the police move in, before Lea is rearrested. The filmmakers smartly employ some barnstorming biker imagery, as the motoboys procession through the barrio, and at another point when Andreia leads them, as though at the head of a great cavalry movement. These moments, and the shots of the oil well, have a romantic cinematic power, summoning up the ghosts of Brando in The Wild Ones or Dean in Giant. The images feel as though they are being skilfully welded onto the unwieldy mechanism that is the film overall.

Because, Mato Seco em Chamas is clearly far more than just a dystopian drama. It’s also clearly rooted in the everyday turmoil of Brazilian society. There is footage from a Bolsonaro rally, as well as several sequences in the favela where the women are based which have a vivid fly-on-the-wall feel. A female singer performs to a favela crowd; Andreia sings in a Pentecostal church. The line between fiction and fact is blurred, even more when the film suggests that its protagonists aren’t actually actors, but real people who have been drafted into this fiction, and the apparent reveal that Lea has gone to prison a second time actually means that the actress who is playing Lea has gone back to prison.

The resultant film is percussive, punctuated with music from the barrio, treading a fine line between the real and the imagined; showing us a favela world which is lived like a Mad Max movie, and who are we to know how true or not this is. A sequence towards the end seems to suggest that the petrol which the women trade is actually a cipher for narcotics, but even this remains unclear. At two and a half hours long, this is a challenging, radical film which feels as though it has emerged from some kind of parallel cinematic sphere, one which knows and uses the tropes of cinema, but isn’t all that interested in them: instead it seeks to capture something of the reality of the Wild West of Brazil’s edge-lands.