POTENCIAIS À DERIVA
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.
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DIRECTOR, SOUND, EDIT
Leonardo PirondiSOUND MIXING
Aidan ReynoldsSUPPORTED BY
Sundance Institute & Galeria Mola Arte Contemporânea -
FESTIVALS
WP: International Film Festival (Tiger Short Competition); Rotterdam, Netherlands
- Toronto International Film Festival (Wavelengths); Toronto, Canada 2024
- Viennale; Vienna, Austria 2024
- Mar del Plata International Film Festival; Mar del Plata, Argentina 2024
- Edinburgh International Film Festival; Edinburgh, UK 2024
- Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (Nouveaux alchimistes); Montreal, Canada 2024
- Curtas Vila do Conde; Vila do Conde, Portugal 2024
- EXiS - International Competition; Seoul, Republic of Korea 2024
- Media City Film Festival; Windsor, Canada 2024
- Sinédoque; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 2024
- Beijing International Short Film Festival Film (Competition); Beijing, China 2024
- Peripheries Experimental Film & Video Festival; Chicago, USA 2024
- Revolutions per Minute Festival; Boston and Cambridge, USA
- Festival Intl. de Cine Contemporáneo Cámara Lúcida; Cuenca, Ecuador 2024
- BOGOSHORTS (Bogotá Short Film Festival); Bogotá, Colombia 2024
- Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival; Greek Film Archive, Athens, Greece 2024
- Cinemateca de Bogotá; Bogotá, Comlombia 2025
- San Diego Underground Film Festival; San Diego, USA 2025SHOWS & OTHER SCREENINGS
- Hidden in the Archives | programed by the ELSE team at Doc Club and Pub; Bangkok, Thailand 2024
- Artist Talk at University of Virginia; Charlottesville, USA 2024 -
"With Adrift Potentials, Brazilian filmmaker Leonardo Pirondi reflects on questions of (lost) history and colonialism by way of an unfinished film, invoked through deft, fleeting fragments." - Jesse Cumming (TIFF - Wavelengths)
“Continuing the speculative play of his previous work, POTENCIAIS À DERIVA sees Leonardo Pirondi once again reworking what is said to be a forgotten filmmaker’s unfinished material, this time that of an unnamed artist exiled in Los Angeles from Brazil during its military dictatorship. References to imperialism and colonialism commingle with abstract movements and candid domestic views in this suggestive, politically deft examination ofdisplacement, melancholy and Brazilian identity.” - Salvador Amores (Viennale)
“(…) Whether the found-footage claim is true or a Borgesian conceit, it allows Pirondi to suggestively situation Adrift Potentials under the ambiguous and exculpatory sign of ‘non-film.’ Adrift Potentials is a very porous film. I'm not speaking of its images and sounds, which are very concrete. Rather, from shot to shot, the film seems on the verge of disintegrating, its montage sequences wanting to fly apart. This coincides with the "non-film" idea; Adrift Potentials is only an approximation of what the original artist may have wanted to do. But it also speaks directly to the themes of confinement and barricading Pirondi's images convey.” — Michael Sicinski
“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 (IFFR)
