Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós Retrospective at FIDMarseille

Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós Retrospective at FIDMarseille

Songs and Flames: The Collective Fabulations of Adirley Queirós and Joana Pimenta

The FIDMarseille will welcome Adirley Queirós and Joana Pimenta for the first retrospective of their films outside Brazil.

FSC Director Joana Pimenta is Portuguese and works between Brazil and the United States. She has made two highly acclaimed short films which, in an entirely different language – that of the experimental essay – join the Brazilian filmmaker on a common territory: that of (colonial) counter-history and fictionalized memory. In 2017, Adirley Queirós invited her to work as director of photography on Era uma vez Brasília. After co-directing the incendiary Mato seco em chama in 2022, they are now pursuing an ever closer collaboration.

For the past twenty years, Adirley Queirós has been making cinema with the inhabitants of Ceilândia, a satellite city of Brasília. Since Rap, O Canto da Ceilândia (2005), each film is invented as a prototype, combining documentary material and fictional energies to invert the relationship between the center and the margin. Real and fake archives, anticipation and dystopia, local radio and urban music: a minority people revives the political power of cinema to imagine their memory, to portray their anger and their hope for change.

They create collective tales to shape history, counter segregation, and invent uprising: it’s this necessary artistic and political ambition that FIDMarseille is delighted to present and reflect upon in the company of Adirley Queirós and Joana Pimenta. The two filmmakers will be present in Marseille throughout the 35th edition of the festival and their films screen June 26-29.

This retrospective will continue in Paris, from July 5 to 8, when the 35th edition of FIDMarseille resumes at the Cinémathèque Française.