Congist'26: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Crisis

Tropical Weather-Worlds: Time, Atmosphere, and Crisis in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema

Not scheduled

20m

Istanbul University Faculty of Letters

Oral Presentation

Speaker

Virginia Evi (IULM University of Milan)

Description

This contribution analyzes how contemporary Brazilian cinema stages crisis through atmospheric and temporal disruptions, foregrounding climate, sensorial perception, and narrative form. Drawing on Tim Ingold's concept of Weather-Worlds, the study explores films such as Bacurau (2019), Recife Frio (2009), O Tempo que Leva (2013), Branco Sai, Preto Fica (2014), Dry Ground Burning (2022), A Vida Invisível (2019), A Queda do Céu (2024) and Chuva é cantora na Aldeia dos Mortos (2018).
Taken together, these works articulate a tropical liminal landscape, where atmosphere acts as a medium of crisis – meteorological, social, emotional, and cosmological – an active force that destabilizes chronology, reshapes everyday life, and produces new modes of inhabiting the present. Recife Frio and O tempo que Leva use anomalous weather to expose social fragilities and temporal derangements, whereas Bacurau frames community resistance within heat, drought, and nocturnal opacity. Stagnant peripheral heat in Branco Sai, Preto Fica produces a temporality shaped by trauma and exclusion, while Dry Ground Burning radicalizes thermal narration: fire, fuel extraction, and nocturnal combustion generate a dystopian present where temperature itself drives the story. A vida invisivel translate tropical humidity into emotional climate, producing a temporal regime of delay, longing, and fractured memory. In Chuva é Cantora, rain functions as a ritual threshold, revealing an Indigenous cosmology that unsettles linear historical time.
This liminality resonates with Brazil hosting COP30 for the first time: the tropical context become both a lens and a mise en abyme for contemporary climate challenges. Through hybrid forms of fiction, dystopia, and documentary, these films place time out of joint, revealing cinema as a material and atmospheric art that enacts temporality through temperature, luminosity, and sound, transforming perception into audio-visual experience.