Taba
2010 · 16m · Brésil
Directed by Marcos Pimentel
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Among the debris and ruins of a contemporary Brazilian city, members of different urban tribes improvise a daily war for survival in a territory of perpetual imbalance.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Taba refuses to pick a lane — it's documentary, essay, something closer to urban poetry — and most scouts will squirm at that mess. That refusal to be legible is exactly why it matters, especially in a moment when genre purity gets mistaken for craft.
Pimentel constructs a rigorous visual essay that inherits from both the Brazilian Cinema Novo tradition and contemporary expanded documentary practice; the film's formal restraint — letting compositional balance and negative space do the argument — positions it as essential viewing for anyone tracking how nonfiction cinema thinks through conflict and territory.
The crucial move isn't the subject matter but the decision to let the 'tribes' move through the frame without narration or hierarchy — a single formal choice that transforms what could've been sociology into something genuinely ambiguous and alive, and you feel it in every misaligned cut.
Reviews
Avec ce film, le réalisateur donne à voir la ville autrement... il filme ce qu'on ne voit pas, cette succession de détails devant lesquels on passe quotidiennement sans s'arrêter. Avec « Taba », l'expérience urbaine n'est plus la même.