Leap of Faith. I. The World Becomes a Sign

Join us on July 7 at the e-flux Screening Room's rooftop for The World Becomes a Sign, the first of the four-part summer screening series , bringing together artists’ films and cinema features from Brazil, Belgium, Spain, Vietnam, Japan, and the United States.

Modern life was supposed to make the world more rational and easier to explain. Yet many experiences resist rational explanation: an illness without a clear cause, an ethical demand that changes a life, the presence of the dead, an image that outlives what it records. The films in this program engage with experiences that transcend what exists within the concrete, physical world. To take a leap of faith, here, is to act on the chance that this world holds more than it shows.

Screenings take place on Tuesdays from July 7–28, 2026, and begin after sunset. Read more about the series here.

I. The World Becomes a SignTuesday, July 7, 2026, after sunset

In these films, an encounter with the unknown has yet to be given meaning: the boundary between landscape and imagination becomes uncertain, a fever arrives without a clear cause. The leap of faith here lies in trusting signs in the land or in the body as traces of Brazil’s histories of Indigenous dispossession still acting on the present. The question is less whether these signs can be explained than what happens when people begin to read the world differently.

Ana Vaz, Há terra! (There is Land!) (2016, Brazil, 12 minutes)
Ha Terra! is an encounter, a hunt, a diachronic tale of looking and becoming. As in a game, as in a chase, the film errs between character and land, land and character, predator and prey.
Maya Da-Rin, Fever (2019, Brazil, 98 minutes)
Maya Da-Rin’s enigmatic debut centers on Justino, a 45-year-old Desana Indigenous man who works as a security guard at the cargo port of Manaus and lives with his youngest daughter in a modest house on the city’s periphery. As his daughter prepares to leave for Brasília to study medicine, Justino is seized by a mysterious fever that draws him back toward the village he left twenty years earlier. Set between the concrete expanses of an industrial Amazonian city and the forest of Justino’s memory, the film turns illness into a sign of unease about the way life is lived today.
For more information, contact [email protected].
In case of rain, the event will take place in our indoor Screening Room.

Ana Vaz (b. 1986, Brazil) is an artist and filmmaker who works with cinema as a tool. Her films, or rather her film-poems, travel through territories and events haunted by the perennial consequences of internal and external forms of colonialism, and their footprints on the earth as well as on human and other-than-human forms. Her practice can also take the shape of writing, critical pedagogy, installations, film programs, or ephemeral events, which are expansions or developments of her films. Her works have been presented at film festivals, seminars, and art institutions across the world.

Maya Da-Rin (b. 1979, Rio de Janeiro) is a Brazilian filmmaker and visual artist. Her films and installations move between fiction, documentary, and contemporary art, and have been presented at Locarno, DOK Leipzig, MoMA, and other festivals and institutions. Her documentaries Margem/Margin (2007) and Terras/Lands(2009) were filmed in the Amazon region. Her first fiction feature, A Febre/The Fever (2019), premiered in Locarno’s international competition, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize and the Best Actor Leopard for Régis Myrupu.