Over 36 years, an unmarried surgeon filmed and dissected insects in his Brussels apartment. 600 reels of wonderful, obsessively precise recordings and increasingly confused commentary paint a strange psychological profile. During his research on Dr. Veroft, Antoine Fontaine comes across a species of man whose social behaviour is conspicuously focused on six-legged creatures and who share their habitat with audibly scurrying chitin carapaces and Darth Vader figurines.

André Eckardt

When you come to Penúmbria, stranger, take care! Because there’s nowhere else to go from here. Penúmbria is a fictitious place by the sea. The coast is rough, the clouds hang low over the horizon. Deep sadness drips from every crevice and the infrastructure collapsed a long time ago. The locals decided one day to just leave their community to the course of time. And one day we might say: earth is as uninhabitable as Penúmbria. A dystopia.

Ralph Eue

The opening sequence alone, which links the past and the present like a time tunnel, confirms Lucia Murat as one of the great storytellers of Brazilian cinema. In 1999 she shot a feature film in the Kadiweu reservation in Mato Grosso. 13 years later she returns to follow up on the lives of several protagonists who played small parts at the time. The contrast between the earlier images and those recorded recently reveals the Kadiweu’s problems: electrification brought television sets, then alcohol and the Protestant church. How can tradition, language and identity be preserved when the young people move to the cities? When the ministers object to the old traditions? When white cattle farmers settle illegally on the territory of the indigenous population? The film is an associative and narrative investigation into these issues, managing again and again to measure the distance that separates the Kadiweu from their past by small events and details – the Day of the Dead, the explanation of a name. They used to be a warrior people who fought on horseback. Today they wash their Japanese motorcycles in the river and negotiate land rights with lawyers. And still remain Kadiweu. This at least is the defiant statement of this amazing film’s final shot.

Matthias Heeder