It is Night in America (É noite na América)
Captioned for d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing viewers
Join us at Cample on Thursday 20 April for a screening of Brazilian artist and director Ana Vaz’s striking debut feature It is Night in America (É Noite na América), ‘a mesmerising, poetic odyssey exploring the contamination of urban expansion on the natural world.’ (Fiona Armour).
Filmed in the zoo of Brasília, home to hundreds of species rescued in the city — giant anteaters, maned wolves, owls, wood foxes, capybaras — It is Night in America incorporates the eeriness of eco-noir with the ethnographic nature of a documentary. The animals, a vital presence in many of Vaz’s films, are not only the subjects of our gaze; they too are watching us. As a headline in the local newspaper reads: ‘Are animals invading our cities, or rather are we occupying their habitat?’
Inspired by reading Brazilian philosopher Juliana Fausto’s book ‘A cosmopolitics of animals’, Vaz returns to the subject of her native Brasília (which she explored in earlier films) and continues her ongoing project of subverting the traditional dynamics between filmmaker, camera and filmed subject – and between sound and image.
In the film, blue is the dominant colour and the footage feels underexposed – a result of working with old and expired 16mm film, and also an allusion to the ‘day for night’ technique which in French is called ‘nuit américaine’ (‘American night’), because of its prevalence in low-budget American movies, particularly westerns. É Noite na América is a nocturnal western that blurs perspectives.
After the screening we will share a response to the film by Glasgow-based artist and writer, Kate Timney.
It is Night in America (É Noite na América) was produced by the Fondazione In Between Art Film (Italy) together with French company Spectre Production and Brazilian company Pivô.
Ana Vaz (1986, Brazil) is an artist and filmmaker who works with cinema as an instrument. Her films, or rather her film-poems, travel through territories and events haunted by the perennial consequences of internal and external forms of colonialism, and their footprints on the earth as well as on human and different from human forms. Her practice can also take the shape of writing, critical pedagogy, installations, film programs or ephemeral events, which are expansions or developments of her films.
Her works have been presented, screened and discussed at film festivals, seminars and institutions such as Berlinale Forum/Forum Expanded; New York Film Festival – Projections; TIFF Wavelengths, Toronto; BFI, London; Cinéma du Réel, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Fondazione In Between Art Film, Venice; LUX Moving Images, London; Tabakalera, San Sebastián; Whitechapel Gallery, London; MAM – Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo; Sesc Belenzinho, São Paulo; Matadero, Madrid; Jameel Arts Center, Dubai; Confort Moderne, Poitiers; Savvy Contemporary, Berlin; Sonic Acts, Amsterdam; among others. She is a recipient of the Sundance Film Institute Nonfiction Grant (2019), Film Society of Lincoln Center Kazuko Trust Award (2015) and grand prizes at Punto de Vista Film Festival (2020), 25FPS (2020), Cinéma du Réel (2016), Media City Film Festival (2015), Fronteira Experimental and Documentary Film Festival (2015). Ana Vaz is also a founding member of the COYOTE collective along with Tristan Bera, Nuno da Luz, Elida Hoëg and Clémence Seurat, an interdisciplinary group working between ecology and political science through conceptual and experimental formats.
In the film, blue is the dominant colour and the footage feels underexposed – a result of working with old and expired 16mm film, and also an allusion to the ‘day for night’ technique which in French is called ‘nuit américaine’ (‘American night’), because of its prevalence in low-budget American movies, particularly westerns. É Noite na América is a nocturnal western that blurs perspectives.
After the screening we will share a response to the film by Glasgow-based artist and writer, Kate Timney.
It is Night in America (É Noite na América) was produced by the Fondazione In Between Art Film (Italy) together with French company Spectre Production and Brazilian company Pivô.
Kate Timney is an artist & writer from Cumbria, based in Glasgow, working across and between art writing, creative publishing, art education and printmaking. She co-edits a journal called Pala Press, and lectures in Fine Art. She is currently studying on the MLitt Art Writing programme at Glasgow School of Art.
It Is Night in America
Dir. Ana Vaz
2022, Italy, Brazil, France, 66mins
Portuguese with English subtitles
+ A response to the film from Glasgow-based artist & writer Kate Timney
Watch at Cample:
Thursday 20 April, 7:00pm
Tickets on a sliding scale:
£5 / £3 / £2 / Free
Ticket guide available here
A Response to the film by Kate Timney
Commissioned by CAMPLE LINE to coincide with our screening of ‘It is Night in America’, Kate Timney wrote a response to the film – A blue to uproot skyscrapers. You can listen to Kate reading the text below, or download and read the PDF.
Read commissioned text by Kate Timney – A blue to uproot skyscrapers – here