Brazilian Screenings: Ava Yvy Vera - The Land of the Lightning’s People

To close the 2024–2025 season of Brazilian Screenings, we are honored to welcome our guest curator, Naara Fontinele. Originally from Rondônia, a Brazilian state nestled in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, Naara will present a film highlighting Brazil’s Indigenous nations. She is an independent scholar in film and media studies, as well as a film educator and curator. Naara holds a Ph.D. in Cinema from the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle (France) and is temporarily based in the Bay Area.
The guest curator shares the following insight about the film:
"Alongside testimonies and reenactments, Ava Yvy Vera follows, between documentation and mise en scène, the daily life in Guaiviry, as cultivated by the Guarani and Kaiowá envision in their bem viver (living well). Directed by a collective of Guarani-Kaiowá filmmakers, Ava Yvy Vera portrays the reoccupation of the land by its Avá Guarani inhabitants, in the region of Mato Grosso do Sul near the Paraguayan border, where agribusiness oligarchs perpetuate a genocide that dates back to the colonial period. The film retells the murder of their leader, Nisio Gomes, by forty masked gunmen in 2011. The careful work in the act of filming and capturing time allows Ava Yvy Vera to unravel, from the history of violence and trauma experienced by the Guarani and Kaiowá, a fiction of the reclaimed land that incorporates cinema into the very heart of its resistance."