Potenciais à Deriva (Adrift Potentials)
16mm, 11.5 minutes, color/b&w, sound, Brazil/USA, 2024
This pseudo diary film is made of found materials from an unfinished 16mm film. Potenciais à Deriva is a film started by a Brazilian artist under a pseudonym while living in exile in Los Angeles, California. Isolated shots and previously assembled scenes reveal an intention to create a mysterious film comprised of disembodied interviews, empty rooms, radio recordings, soccer games, and sudden apparitions of the filmmaker that slowly ruminates on Brazil's colonial past, North American Imperialism and the military dictatorship of the time in a paranoid and anxious manner.
Be aware that the film's final version never came to exist. This version presented is my mere attempt to produce a film with these otherwise lost images.
WORDS
“For the past several years, Leonardo Pirondi has created a fascinating body of experimental works that play with fictional documentary frameworks to produce complex layers of meaning. From a voyage of the Brazilian military to find a mythical island in Vision of Paradise to a sociological experiment involving children isolated in a forest in When We Encounter the World, these films revel in the ambiguity of both their metafictional premises and their avant-garde formal language. Potenciais à deriva is the best and most mysterious of these works to date.” — Alex Fields
“The found fragments of exile bring life to an unfinished film started by a Brazilian artist who lived in Los Angeles. Working under a pseudonym, the unknown filmmaker lingers on absences, empty landscapes and disembodied voices. These visual vacancies act as apparitions of a distant Brazil wrought by US Imperialism and military dictatorship. An unfinished piece, the film portrays the lingering fragments of work as dispersed as the diasporic maker.” — Cristina Kolozsváry-Kiss
SOUND MIX
Aidan Reynolds
FESTIVAL EXHIBITIONS
- International Film Festival Rotterdam: Tiger Short Competition; Rotterdam, Netherlands 2024
- TBA
SHOWS & OTHER SCREENINGS
- Hidden in the Archives | programed by the ELSE team at Doc Club and Pub; Bangkok, Thailand 2024