AUDIO: English, Portuguese
SUBTITLE: Romanian, English
Arthropod Shorts
Arthropod Shorts
Germany, Brazil
In the middle of the Brazilian short film “Damn Ironland,” between two sections composed of high-definition images, a collection of grainy, trembling archival footage crops up. It shows a high wall which erupts from amidst the Amazonian jungle – a structure which seems almost supernatural, a testimony to how strange it looks in relation to the surrounding landscape. At some point, a shadow passes over it and, in a slow-motion-like movement, the wall begins to crumble as a brownish stream starts to flow turbulently from behind it. In an apocalyptic scene, the trees, the houses, and then the cars and the people running like ants breaking out of a destroyed anthill are swallowed by the torrent; from the high-altitude point where it’s positioned, the camera moves chaotically, while the soundtrack resounds with disarticulated screaming. The event captured on film is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of Brazil: the collapse of the tailings dam of the Brumadinho iron ore mine in 2019. Before these horrifying images, filmmaker Michael Geidel inserts shots taken around the other 800 mining projects taking place in the country, which capture the scale of the ecological disaster caused by this type of exploitation. And, as an epilogue, we are shown what remained of the area where the accident took place: an immense swamp, from which vehicle carcasses emerge occasionally. The question we are left with isn’t whether or not the spaces we have seen at the beginning of the film will turn into the desolate landscape contemplated in the end, but how much time and how many lives it will take for this to happen. (Liri Alienor Chapelan)
AUDIO: English, Portuguese
SUBTITLE: Romanian, English