Ana Vaz is an artist and filmmaker born in the Brazilian Midwest, a place haunted by the ghosts buried under its modernist capital: Brasília. Her films provoke and question cinema as an art of the (in)visible and an instrument capable of transforming human perception, broadeningconnectionswith**non-human or spectral forms of life. Her filmmaking is extended or results in other artistic activities such writing, critical pedagogy, installation and collective initiatives.

Her films have been shown around the world, both at film festivals and in exhibition venues.

She has been recipient of the Kazuko Trust Award (Film Society of Lincoln Center) and awarded the Robert E. Fulton Fellowship from Harvard University. Her films have been awarded at Cinéma du Réel (Há Terra!, 2016), at Punto de Vista (Apiyemiyekî?, 2019), at Media City and Frontier (Occidente, 2014). Her works are part of the collections of the Cnap (Centre national des arts plastiques), Kadist, the Frac Bretagne and the Pinacoteca de São Paulo. In 2024--25, she has been a resident at the Villa Medici.

Ana Vaz's second feature film aGer It Is Night in America, Hanabi, project conceived as part of her invitation to Le Fresnoy, is a story about radioactivity. Shot in Japan over a period of ten years, it observes a country in the grip of a deadly but intangible threat. Something has happened, but life goes on; Tokyo continues to renovate and expand; new soil replaces the irradiated land; islands sprout in the Pacific Ocean; workers, citizens, engineers, farmers and monks all strive in their own way to heal their community's trauma. Weaving through this constellation of testimonies and experiences, the* Diary of a Radioactive Brain *by writer Yoko Hasuke, written in the wake of the tsunami and nuclear disaster that followed the Tohoku earthquake, and freely adapted by Ana Vaz in collaboration with its author, is a medium for the neither entirely personal nor entirely anonymous voices of mutant bodies no longer protected by their skin, losing their contours in a generalised state of disorder. [...] This film, a genuine sensory journey, steers between experimental cinema and documentary, using a vibrant aesthetic to bring forth a reflection on subjectivity, time, ecology, catastrophe, the imaginary and utopia. Vaz's formal boldness, coupled with her attentive and curious gaze, invites viewers to question**the intimate and the collective, the quest for identity and the search for meaning in a world whose contours are dissolving before our eyes. In a series of hypnotic sequences, *Hanabi *asserts itself as a visual poem in which each shot, each sound, each gesture is an invitation to lose ourselves and then find ourselves again. Displaying rare sensibility, Ana Vaz succeeds in creating a work that is both universal and deeply personal.

Ana Vaz's gesture echoes fukeiron, the theory of landscape articulated by filmmaker Masao Adachi, who traced the trajectory of a murderer through the places he had passed through, but also the diaristic practice of avant-garde cinema, which seeks to link the individual and the collective, the real and the subjective. Certainly, it takes a great deal of courage, sensitivity and talent to make a film about the consequences of this nuclear disaster in a country that would undoubtedly prefer to bear the blame alone. But this story belongs to all living beings, human or non-human, as much as it does to Japan. It is the story of a Japanese writer, a Buddhist monk, a beekeeper who was once a nuclear power plant builder, evacuated residents, and a filmmaker who has become a mother, all of whom are confronted with the need to consider the entropy of a world whose capacity for regeneration is limited. It is the story of individuals and communities upon whom the disaster is forcing increasing fragmentation, as well as the need to reinvent their relationships.

Antoine Thirion