Item 1 of 4

Available for rent
13 min
Brazil, 1989

Production : Casa de cinema
English, French

Silver Bear for Best Short Feature 1990 - Berlinale

Society



Synopsis


A tomato is planted, harvested and sold at a supermarket, but it rots and ends up in the trash. But it doesn’t end there: Isle of Flowers follows it up until its real end, among animals, trash, women, and children. Then, the difference between tomatoes, pigs and human beings becomes clear.

A word from Tënk


Do you have twelve minutes to spare to watch a fiction that isn’t actually a fiction whose mission is to scrutinise the great modern narrative that we could also name THE fiction? Only twelve minutes to take a global tour of the cycles of domination via money and the power of capital, illustrated here by the trajectory of a Brazilian tomato. Yes, a tomato!! 
 
Aside from the very memorable performance of the tomato itself, another fabulous aspect of this award-winning film is the dialectical extraterrestrial commentary; a descriptive and mechanical style with ethnographic leanings that is both absurd and tragicomic and assuredly frightening! 
 
This film parodies the ethnographic gaze of another century with a narrative text that pretends to be distant and neutral, forming primary links (but how real it all is, therein lies the drama!) and displaying a supposedly non-judgmental posture. Absurd in its enunciations, that build logical deductions, all the while neglecting the existence of complexity. But one can’t help but wonder if these incisive shortcuts of thought could not come directly from the logic of our economic system, itself embodied in this narrative? This might explain why this film, in all its burlesque appearance, is so disturbing.  
 
And all the while, human inequality and environmental harm grows. A film without flowers, from 1989, that is still relevant, unfortunately.

 

 

Sylvie Lapointe
Filmmaker

 

 

Item 1 of 4

Item 1 of 4