Acidente

The organisational principle in this poetic exploration of twenty towns in Minas Gerais, Brazil is chance according to the makers. But they don’t give themselves enough credit. Indebted to nothing apart from the direct present, they look, they feel and they listen. It is above all their capacity, at different times of day, to surrender themselves entirely to the moment passing in front of the camera that makes Accident such a special experience.
The makers travel through towns with names such as Happy Hope, Red Waters, Aching Fields, Watery Eyes and Uncovered where they find stone, water, dawn, night, shadow, action, standstill, man, child and animal. Long before the names of the towns are united in a visual poem they are chained together through their shared suggestive power. They are not reduced anywhere to folklore or blown up into philosophical bragging. Observed with refinement, the visual encounters and fragments of conversations touch on a wealth of stories unshown, stories that have just taken place or might be about to. Isolated in the present, the short sequences have an impressionable simplicity, as if the viewer can literally touch their texture. Minimal sound effects and music fragments give minor colour accents to the pictures that always narrate but never allow themselves to reveal an analysis. Time is turned into an experience. (GT)