Time Travel Documentary: White Out Black In, selected by Roger Alan Koza

Usually, festivals show this amazing movie by Adirley Queiros as if it were a documentary, but… since when did it become possible to film time travelling? Here, it seems as if at least one of the characters came from the future with a very specific mission: to avoid the damage induced by the Brazilian State against a part of the population living in the outskirts of Brasilia at Antiga Ceilândia, Distrito Federal. This puzzling character is seen as he is teleported inside an empty cabin parked in some sort of wasteland surrounding an enormous empty building. He goes from place to place and sometimes spies on two of his friends who were beaten up by cops in a disco on March 5, 1986. The excuse for the police action was a drug raid, but it was actually carried out due to racial hatred. This battering was not without consequences; Marquim was paralyzed after it and Sartana lost a leg.

What at first could be seen as a testimonial documentary soon becomes some sort of ‘observational documentary’ about a shared fantasy. Nothing is staged, except one demand posed to the two main characters; they must go beyond verbal reconstruction of events and substitute it with a recount of their lives in which traumas are exorcized through fiction. Violence, sublimated and turned into poetry, arrives at the end in a cartoonish way when apparently there is an attack against official buildings; within the context of these guys’ lives, such a playful outcome is completely understandable. Watching Marquim moving around his house in a wheelchair as he raps for his radio program or Sartana selling prostheses to people who suffer the same physical ailments he has to face, becomes in fact a contrasting backdrop to an ending not without its dose of rage.

It is only justifiable to understand Queirós’ film as a documentary if we think about it as a movie devoted to recording urban spaces in the outskirts of big cities. Open shots conveying an infinite space without any specific references attached to it, architecture in which debris and waste give shape to a land detached from nature; Sartana and Marquim’s everyday tasks (somehow similar to the devastation perceived throughout this territory) prove the remarkable spiritual fortitude of the two main characters. They are the ones who give us enough information to understand that losing a leg and being forced to permanent paralysis are the aftermath of actions exerted by the State against the meek bodies of citizens who exist only to serve those who live in the centre; citizens who must commute every day to go back to their marginal areas in order to rest.

Queirós’ creative cheekiness reminds us of Glauber Rocha’s irreverence. This, his second feature, is simply a film alike no other. This is filmmaking born from a keen desire, from a need; this is a fist that becomes a camera to struggle, shot after shot, against those contemporary films — alas, too many — which are suffocating, hypocritical and mediocre.

Roger Alan Koza works as a film critic in the Córdoba newspaper La Voz del Interior; publishes regularly on films in Quid and Ñ magazines and as well as on his blog Ojosabiertos at Otroscines site. He currently hosts and directs the TV show El cinematógrafo aired by Channel 10 in Córdoba and 360 Channel around Argentina. He has published Con los ojos abiertos: crítica de cine de algunas películas recientes (2004). He has also published the essay El inconsciente de las películas, in Arte e Psiconálisis (2005). He edited Cine y pensamiento: las conferencias de Mar del Plata (2006), and Cine del mañana (2007). Since 2006 he has been a programmer for the Vitrina section at the Hamburg International Film Festival; and since 2011 for the FICUNAM (Universidad Autónoma de Mexico’s International Film Festival). Between 2009 and 2011, he directed the Festival of the Rio Negro Proyecta National Festival (Argentina). Since 2014, he is also the artistic director for the Cosquín International Film Festival (Córdoba). He has been a juror at various international film festivals.

White Out, Black In: A Question of Space from Roger Alan Koza on Vimeo.