"The jury was immobilized immediately by the film's controlled and confident opening shots. These dark documents of labor and criminality set up an obscure, 'hybrid' space that falls between or, rather, straddles 'fiction' and 'documentary' but very quickly this distinction becomes of little interest, even within the context of a documentary film festival. This is because the engagement the film displays on a micro and a macro level with the present of a deeply divided country could not be more real. Living on the margins of Brazil's crumbling social and economic infrastructure, Dry Ground Burning's 'cast' of deeply engaging and idiosyncratic protagonists tackle desire, sexuality and the family head-on, while enacting utopian attempts at a future in which prisons are reformed or abolished and where workers own the means of production. These 'themes' are complex and capacious enough to merit several films but the audaciousness of the filmmakers' craft made us want to go wherever they took us, from the economic and geographical suburbs of Brasilia to the delusional rallies in support of Bolsonaro at the heart of the city. We were unanimous in our decision to award Adirley Queirós and Joana Pimenta the International Feature Dox prize."
