""Fire of Wind" is a movie of images, and its attention to light and shadow, to the texture of faces and of tree bark, of foliage and terrain, is among the most careful and most daring that I've ever seen. (Mateus and Vítor Carvalho did the cinematography.) Although "Fire of Wind" is drastically different from other films in recent release, it nonetheless harks back to a venerable tradition in political filmmaking."
"In "Fire of Wind," Mateus finds her own way through these mighty influences, including by locating her own sense of physical drama amid the abstract vectors of political and economic power amid the beauty and the lure of nature. While the workers, in the trees, stay still, the bull's looming, drifting presence gives frozen stillness an unambiguous motive and makes moments when people shift and even leap from branch to branch terrifyingly suspenseful."
Mateus stages Fire of Wind with heightened, artificial diction and painterly compositions that frame cast members as witnesses. The film privileges images, emphasizing light, shadow, facial texture, tree bark, foliage, and terrain through meticulous cinematography. The approach draws on political filmmaking traditions and the declamation of text by nonprofessional actors, while tracing mythic, loamy explorations of impoverished lives across history. Physical drama emerges within abstract political and economic forces, juxtaposing still, arboreal workers with a drifting bull, and escalating to strikes, roaming paramilitaries, and a solitary wounded soldier to layer personal memory and public events.
Read at The New Yorker
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]