ROUTE [not every day, but almost]
2026 · 9m · Brazil
Directed by Juá Leindecker, Flora Leles
Genres: experimental, musical, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, surreal, whimsical
Filmed in one take, young dancers turn the streets of Salvador into a surreal journey of everyday wonder.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
One-take surrealism about dancers in Salvador should be pretentious garbage, but instead it's genuinely disorienting—the constraint forces the filmmakers to abandon the usual avant-garde safety net and just *commit* to the bit, which somehow makes it work.
A formally rigorous single-take structure that recalls the durational cinema lineage (Bela Tarr, Tarkovsky's influence) while grounding itself in the specificity of Salvador's streets and dance tradition—the choice to resist cutting is both technical discipline and thematic statement.
The single-take commitment forces every movement, every transition, every beat to earn its place; the dancers' bodies become the editing, turning what could be indulgent into something economical and precise—that structural decision is what makes the surrealism land instead of float away.