ACCIDENT (Brazil)

Directors Pablo Lobato and Cao Guimaraes are natives of the large state of Minas Gerais located in southeast Brazil. From the hundreds of towns there, they selected twenty whose evocative names were used to write a poem. Turned out neither Lobato nor Guimaraes had visited any of them. They decided to create a portrait of Minas Gerais composed of 20 sequences shot in Super-8 representing the towns selected. They arrived without expectations as to what they would find, without a plan or a method. "We had to unlearn how to look", they explain. Whatever they'd capture would be by accident, in a spirit of total freedom. The resulting 72-minute documentary/film poem is a fascinating experiment. The information about the land and its people is almost exclusively conveyed visually, in a tradition that goes all the way back to silents like Berlin:Symphony of a Great City. The directors asked no questions but did not discourage subjects who wished to address the camera, as when a gay man discusses the difficulty of finding true love in a small town. Accident captures slices of village life, like a religious procession and passion play, a rodeo in which a transvestite is one of the participants; a man gets off his truck barefoot and dives into a natural pool on the side of the road, people buy bread as the sun begins to rise, vehicles of all kinds go up a steep cobblestone road, a folk band plays inside a dingy bar, nearby forests disappear under heavy morning fog...At times, Guimaraes and Lobato hold a shot longer than the content merits. And too often, the filmmakers indulge their penchant for abstract photography, closing up on random objects for no discernible reason. Accident is inconsistently inspired and rewarding.