You have before your eyes one of the most furious cinematic gestures of 2022: nothing but a Brazilian guerilla film that knows what it wants all too well – to reclaim public space from the hands of those who, under the auspices of Jair Bolsonaro’s authoritarian regime, turned it into an unlivable reality. “Dry Ground Burning” belongs to that variety of films – incandescent and niched in its intensity – for which the duty to stand in solidarity with the defeated and the forgotten in the big shots’ society is more than empty rhetoric: it is the unwritten contract these cinematic gestures pass on to the viewer; it is the only way the latter can ascend to the level of the utopia they make possible. The film follows Chitara, recently released from jail, while she organizes a feminist insurrection by using the tricks of those at the top: the oil diverted from the big refineries and called to fuel a radical political party, put to the service of the dispossessed. Documentary and fiction are its weapons, amateur performers – full-time characters. A film like a Molotov cocktail that, in the context of the recent Brazilian elections, promises to resonate even more deeply. (Victor Morozov)