Actualités

Alvorada Vermelha – Red Dawn

Directed by João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra da Mata

28 minutes, 2011

A documentary on a meat market in Macao evokes question of life, death and morality.

Opening with a high heeled shoe in foreground in a presentation of the mundane, we are introduced to our world under the pretense of new perspectives. More than just documentary, this film is shaped and formed by associations, magical tangents and powerful compositions. The film’s first part anticipates the meat market with baroque compositions, reminders perhaps of Vermeer and the works of the Renaissance. They are contemporary locales, composed using variations on single and multiple point perspective, which brings poetry and discomfort to the documentary footage. It takes almost ten minutes for it to become apparent that we are in a meat market, and the film takes on new meanings as we plunge into a world unseen in the West.

Dear Danny,

Rushing from screen to screen with Tiff’s closing weekend just around the corner, that mix of excitement and exhaustion (a condition Manny Farber once dubbed “Festivalitis”) does indeed become more and more pronounced. Fortunately, the ratio of excitement has for me remained high even when my eyes occasionally grow heavy, thanks largely to alternately stirring and maddening films like Terrence Malick’s latest vision of Eden lost.

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