Ilha das Flores

Here's a work that definitely proves how exciting and questioning a short movie picture can be.

Acting as a director, writer and producer, Jorge Furtado couragely aims a dazzling machinegun at issues as assorted as religion, Holocaust, Brazilian government, poverty, capitalism, and how human intelligence has been used throughout the ages.

Using a dialectical method, and narrating the story in a way that "even a Martian would understand", in the words of the author, the film forges a real cinematographical theorem of Brazilian deplorable situation, borrowing as the stage a neighbourhood in the city of Porto Alegre (one of Brazil's most developed ones, by the way). The degrading scenario, however, would apply to any community on the world in which the effects of money (or its lack) on the lives of its inhabitants are more visible.

In the movie's touching final take, Furtado destroys the bourgeois concept of Freedom, quoting a line from one of Brazil's greatest poetesses, Cecilia Meirelles, and leaves us wondering whether modern 'civilisation' is as far as the human intellect can take us.