It Is Night In America

É NOITE NA AMÉRICA

Italy, Brazil, France, 2022, 60'

An eco-political symphony to rethink our exploitative relationship with nature and animals, Ana Vaz’s first feature aspires to, in her own words, “constantly redefine one's perspective, reconsider one's place, reconfigure one's relationship with what surrounds us, with the other who lives inside us, with our animality, with another temporality, other races and all the ‘others’ who live inside us.” The film unravels an unknown and often neglected universe, an ‘other’ and yet inevitably a double of us, i.e., the forms of animal life that inhabit urban spaces and the few green places left unscathed by the building rage. Close-ups and panning shots expose the bewildered expressions of the animals who roam the outskirts of the city, revealing a world of silent citizens who, with dignity and elegance, move about the darkness of the metropolis; colonized by overbuilding, that makes them ever more strangers, they seem to wait for anthropocentrism to be overturned for good, as the film with its powerful grace apparently suggests.