Our new Cinema Room episode is dedicated to the magical oeuvre of Cao Guimarães, an artist of Brazilian origine who works on the crossing between cinema and visual arts. In the first chapter, we would like to share with you two of his films Sin Peso (2007) and Concerto para clorofila (2004). Both are extremely contemplative, and both explore the reality through color wrapped in sound. Whether it is a symphony of human voices on a flea market or a beautiful concert for piano, the sounds interlace with objects, uniting them into one fluctuant entity. A city- or a land-scape turns into a meditative time-scape, filled with tenderness and poetic vibrations.

In Sin Peso, we find ourselves at a flea market, that suddenly transforms itself into a quasi-abstract landscape filled with floating draperies. On the background, we hear multiform voices. They make the air slightly tremble as they speak, just like the wind agitates the multicolored awnings of the market booths’, making them sway and dance. Everything seems interconnected, with each layer of reality enveloping one another: our breath and the wind, the music of the voices and the tents which are destined to protect the owners of those voices from sun and rain.  Two different dimensions – a hand-crafted human cosmos and the natural forces – are well-balanced, creating a harmonious ecosystem on the streets of the Mexico City.

Concerto para clorofila too explores the union between the image and the sound. A thoughtful succession of landscapes and waterscapes invites us to be attentive to details and to equally enjoy big and small natural manifestations – raindrops knocking on the water surface and making it quiver, tree branches caught by a wave of motion, golden leaf waltzing in the air before collapsing on the ground… Everything is moving and interacting, weaving multiple threads of what seems to be an infinite dialogue. Or are they singing a song that all things share, following a common heartbeat and a rhythm of their own?

Concerto para clorofila is a conjunction of light and shadow, forms, colors and textures that herald the necessary interrelationship of all that is alive and vibrant.

The world hasn´t stopped, things keep moving. The leaves still fall from the trees touched by the wind, the lizards pass the days as if they were nothing. My heart continues to beat, as does yours. We are still in this moment. The future hit the present. I send this letter, a letter of colors, without knowing its destination, or its recipient. Nevertheless, I know that we need these colors in movement. – Cao Guimarães