A granddaughter visits her grandmother in her house in the country, her grandmother is close to 100. We never see the granddaughter, as she is the one behind the camera, and we only see the grandmother fleetingly, moving through the shadowy interiors, gathering herbs from the vegetable patch to make tea, watching a mantis perch on her hand. But this is as much a portrait of her as it is of the space she inhabits, although we never see the whole of that either, just carefully selected fragments in compositions that play with focus and shade: knick-knacks and trinkets, photographs, textures, glimpses of sky through the window, ants, butterfly wings, resting pigeons, a wasp nestled in her palm, the fur of the last remaining dog.
Sounds ebb and flow through this hushed bestiary of the everyday, the voice of the grandmother talking in voice-over of family, spirits and canine reincarnation, the noises of the places in the photos, the television blaring in the background, the different layers of rippling silence that reassert themselves when everything else goes quiet. How do you capture a whole life in just 20 minutes? By listening to its echoes in space.

The dew drips promisingly from the leaves. Ayla wakes up in a beautifully flowering, lush landscape. A new mountain range arises in the distance. The summits: a smiling woman’s head. Ayla sets out towards it. The hills are the supportive nipples, the downy hair on the forearms is the grass she tenderly strokes with her fingers. When she sees a small dense forest on the horizon, she knows where she must go to find the ultimate fulfilment.
Luma Flôres shows Ayla’s self-exploration as an exquisite sensual and tender journey in intense colours. The discovery of her own body and lust are intertwined with the discovery of another, also female body. The intense sensuality remains metaphorical but vivid to the end – for example, when Ayla discovers her lover’s lap as a natural fountain in which she first dips her fingers and then her whole head and body. When the two are at last united in the water and sleep with each other, the animation changes from concrete representation to abstraction – which in turn bursts in the sky like fireworks. Flôres resolves her metaphorical dance only in the final moments of the film: The two women kiss, drift on the water. The fine art of love, but also the simplest, most natural thing in the world.

The activist in her awakened at an early age. Even as an adolescent, Juma Xipaia felt that she would dedicate herself to her Indigenous people’s fight for the right to exist in the Brazilian Amazon region. For the Amazon is their mother, the knowledge, and the cure. More than ten years later, Juma knows what it really means to be an activist. As the first female chief of the Middle Xingu region, she has survived assassination attempts, experienced state violence against protesters, must discover illegal prospectors who are clearing the forests and poisoning the soil and the rivers. But the 34-year-old also sees hope emerge for the Indigenous people of Brazil, because the 2023 change of government gave them their own Ministry for the first time. Juma becomes an undersecretary of state and has her second child: Yanuni.
The Austrian Richard Ladkani portrays Juma Xipaia and her husband Hugo, a special investigator working for the environmental authorities, after they let him accompany their daily life for several years. Ladkani mixes fascinating landscape shots with the explosive power of “embedded journalism”, using the full potential of the big screen in one moment and intensifying intimate moment in the next. The result is private and personal, poetic and political. Above all, the film transports Juma Xipaia’s message that despite every disappointment, responsibility for one’s life should not be placed in the hands of others but kept close to home.