Isle of Flowers
1989 · 13m · Brazil
Directed by Jorge Furtado
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, melancholic
A satirical documentary that traces the journey of a tomato from farm to supermarket to garbage dump, where impoverished families on the Isle of Flowers in Porto Alegre sort through pig refuse for scraps of food. Through this absurd logical chain, it builds a devastating critique of capitalism and social inequality in Brazil.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The deadpan encyclopedia-narrator voice walking you logically down the chain until you realize the pigs eat before the humans — devastating, and you laugh anyway. Thirteen minutes that out-argue most feature documentaries.
Furtado's deadpan syllogism is structurally perfect agitprop, building from tomato to tragedy with logical inevitability. One of the great short documentaries of the late twentieth century, and Vimeo carries it.
The deadpan anthropologist-narrator defining 'human' and 'money' from first principles is the editorial trick that lets the gut-punch land - you're laughing right up until you aren't. Vimeo confirms the 12:34 English-dubbed runtime is live.
Reviews
Regularly acclaimed as the best Brazilian short of all time and one of the greatest feats of the short-film format.
A caustic, unconventional state-of-the-world cine-essay that utilizes an aesthetic of verbal contamination to structure its narrative, bringing together apparently unrelated motifs using a highly ironic and satirical tone.
Festivals
- Berlin International Film Festival 1990, Silver Bear for Best Short Film
- Gramado Film Festival 1989, Best Short Film
- Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival 1991, Special Jury Prize