Quimera (Chimera)

Directed by: Eryk Rocha
When: 8 pm Thursday March 31 2005
Where: Muvico 2 - Centro Ybor

When: Midnight Friday April 1 2005
Where: Muvico 1 - Centro Ybor

When: 4 pm Sunday April 3 2005
Where: Muvico 2 - Centro Ybor

A scene from Quimera

Quimera marks the encounter between Tunga (age 52), one of Brazil's most important contemporary artists in the international circuit, and Eryk Rocha (26), Glauber Rocha's son and the director of Stones in the Sky, a film about his father's exile in Cuba in 1971-72, which has received several awards at film festivals.

In Greek mythology, the chimera is a beast made of several other animals - lion, goat, serpent...

In the film Quimera the viewers incarnate under the fur of street cats and observe a man (the english poet Simon Lane) in the act of shaving. The beard turns into a cat, the cat turns into a beard. Man and cat are melting at the invisible limit of their bodies.

The film takes the viewer into a journey without labels where the limit between fine arts and cinema also becomes invisible.

Tunga comments that “The harmony of the heterogeneous is the film´s main theme.” And Eryk adds: “What is on the screen is flux, is sensorial, is delirious, is dream.”

Quimera is a tribute to the surrealistic tradition in cinema - which, among other classics, has acclaimed Entr´acte by René Clair and L´Âge d´Or (1930) by the duo Buñuel-Dali - but advances in another direction. If the pioneers have kept themselves hostages to the narrative, the Brazilian duo searches the autonomy of the image. They don´t follow any logic. They don´t shoot a film, but a dream.

-Antonio Gonçalves Filho - O Estado de São Paulo