Dry Ground Burning: a Black, lesbian, profoundly matriarchal future

In recent years, Adirley Queirós has playfully described his own work as “ethnographic sci-fi”. Watching his latest feature, Dry Ground Burning, co-directed with Joana Pimenta (who doubles as cinematographer), it’s clear this phrase is still apt. Queirós is one of the most animated, charismatic creators on the Brazilian contemporary movie scene, and though the visual sobriety of his three latest films risks obscuring his satirical grit, an alertness to the humorous undercurrents in his work always proves rewarding.

In Dry Ground Burning, a group of women from Sol Nascente (‘rising sun’), on the outskirts of Brasília’s satellite city Ceilândia, find crude oil. Acting as a collective, these women become gasolinheiras: women who turn crude oil into gasoline for sale. They negotiate with motoboys, bikers who distribute it for a cut, while battling competing cartels that threaten their livelihoods and their lives, in a loose parallel with drug-trafficking. The irony at the film’s centre is that Brazil’s nationalised oil industry, which has so far lined the pockets of politicians and the rich, is both radically privatised and collectivised. Rather than striking it rich, the women enter and help develop an underground economy whose anti-establishment ethos provides the pressure for a fuming volcano of rebellion.

The story centres on tough yet benevolent oil kingpin Chitara; her sister Léa, who, once out of jail, acts as the gasolinheiras’ bodyguard; and their friend, Andreia, who runs for office as Sol Nascente’s district deputy. As military police habitually sweep the neighbourhood in heavily armoured vehicles, Andreia’s Prison People Party (PPP) promises to end police curfews, fix the sewage, and help ex-convicts – many of whom are struggling single moms – with progressive policies. Told through reminiscences more than present-day action, the story unravels like a Greek tragedy. The narrative comes full-circle when the gun-toting Léa fails to stay out of jail, fulfilling the fate her comrades try to derail.

Queirós and Pimenta belong to a larger vanguard of inventive Brazilian directors such as Affonso Uchoa, João Dumans, Juliana Antunes and Gustavo Vinagre, for whom formal boundaries are supple and genres forever shift, and who favour the corporeal expressivity of diverse bodies over naturalistic dramaturgy or conventional staging. This pays off handsomely whenever Dry Ground Burning shrugs off its more fabulist trappings, as when Chitara and Léa discuss families with partly absent parents, or adoring one’s children yet falling back into crime and not seeing them grow up – patterns of disruption and continuance, resilience and vulnerability, setbacks and growth, mapped onto lives that are ultimately too messy to be reduced to a simple dialectic. It’s in these more ostensibly more down-to-earth moments that the film really soars.

Stylistically, the movie’s naturalism accommodates myriad genre overtones, subtler than in Queirós’s earlier work. Léa strikes a convincing enough figure to be an anti-heroine out of a weird western à la Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s Bacurau (2019); science fiction is also detectable on the fringes, with the sisters at one point comparing their newfound status as gasolinheiras to being abducted by aliens. All this underlines the notion that oil-rigging might just be the stuff of daydreams.

But the movie doesn’t really need such nods to futurism. A few lushly dystopian scenes establish a landscape punctuated by metal grates and murky parking lots, with inmates being shuffled onto public transit, and military police scouring areas in a vehicle retrofitted with junkyard tech that’s later dismantled and burned. Visually, these scenes recall the duo’s previous collaboration, Once There Was Brasilia (2017). Pimenta’s static, tenderly unflinching camera is also remarkable at establishing and holding the sisterly intimacy that anchors the story.

Indeed, in Dry Ground Burning, the future isn’t just female: it is Black, lesbian, profoundly matriarchal. This community is carefully organised, and is supremely conscious not only of its marginalised position, outside most conservative networks of working- and middle-class families, but also of its power as a potential mass movement and significant electoral force. A scene in which the directors juxtapose the image of Andreia campaigning through a megaphone on a moving truck with footage of crowds cheering for Jair Bolsonaro fleshes out this political potential beautifully: you might imagine for a second that it’s the PPP being feted, with fireworks ablaze to proclaim the dawn of a new era.

► Dry Ground Burning is in UK cinemas now.