Please join us for the screening of IT IS NIGHT IN AMERICA by Ana Vaz followed by a q&a with the artist & filmmaker.
Tue 19.5.2026
17.45 – 19.45 ZFM Seminar room
Ana Vaz
IT IS NIGHT IN AMERICA (É NOITE NA AMÉRICA)
Film Duration: 66 mins
The q&a with Ana Vaz starts at 19.00
Filmed in Brasília through the flickering light of expired 16 mm stock, Ana Vaz’s film É Noite na América is an incredible, hallucinatory document that moves across city and forest, captivity and survival, past and future, modernism and jungle. The artist engages with her hometown of Brazilia, the capital of Brazil, from the perspective of its nonhuman inhabitants: animals who have been displaced by the city’s modernist fantasy of order and progress. As such, capybaras, anteaters, ariranhas, snakes, birds—each a refugee from a world that was once theirs. The film hovers between documentary and hallucination: a nocturnal bestiary where animals are recognised as political subjects and the urban landscape mutates into a haunted place of grief and reparation. Working with the legay of her father, the late composer Guilherme Vaz, the artist builds a dense acoustic space where the sounds of the jungle merge with the murmurs of the city, composing a landscape of coexistence and exhaustion. In the context of Miratges Mirages, É Noite na América appears as a mirage of species and spaces—a vision that trembles between disappearance and resistance, reminding us that the night is never the end, but rather a call to listen and tune in.
Ana Vaz is an artist and filmmaker born in the Brazilian midwest inhabited by the ghosts buried by its modernist capital: Brasília. Originally from the cerrado and wonderer by choice, Ana has lived in the arid lands of central Brazil and southern Australia, in the mangroves of northern France and in the northeastern shores of the Atlantic. Her filmography activates and questions cinema as an art of the (in)visible and instrument capable of dehumanising the human, expanding its connections with forms of life — other than human or spectral. Consequences or expansion of her cinematography, her activities are also embodied in writing, critical pedagogy, installations or collective walks.
