HAUTES TERRES

Enriched by filmmaker’s long friendship with two landless farmers of the Nordeste, Antonio and Vanilda, Skies and Lands opens as their community is making a fresh start. The twenty families that had set up huts as an occupation camp are soon to be given ownership of the patch of mountain they occupy. With successive visits from a psychologist and social workers to prepare them, as one bluntly says to become bosses, the question of living together and practically organising their permanent settlement fills everyone with excitement. The daily life of Vanilda – who sells clothes from door to door and talks of her children now settled in the city – is portrayed in some most remarkable sequences. The film is attentive to the pertinence of gesture and the political implications of building and forging links with others. Making links, this is what Vanilda does best, as in a shot of comical and moving simplicity, showing her tying a bundle of corncobs with a pliable tree branch. Certainly, for its form, which is constantly revivified by minute epiphanies, the film drew inspiration from these technical intuitions, as complex as they are natural.

Charlotte Garson