The potent and devastating confluence of fear and anxiety is painfully documented in Maira Buhler's Let It Burn, an observational documentary taking place in hostel-turned-social housing project for those struggling with addiction. Examining a specific temporal - the weeks leading up to an election in which the status of the hostel and its inhabitants could be directly impacted - with a deeply empathetic lens, Let It Burn is an intimate yet unobtrusive portrait of life on the fringes which manages emotional poignancy through a largely objective lens that places its subjects and the spaces they inhabit at the forefront of its candid observation. The dread-inducing reality of its subjects is palpable from start-to-finish, the communal connection which these individuals share offering an only temporary reprieve from the larger, colder aspects of society which has largely ostracized them due to their struggles. Building in tension as the film's formal framework largely remains anarchic in its documentation, Let It Burn manages to enunciate the unspoken affect of its subjects, revealing their fragility and underlying fear induced by a lack of a support system, whether it be familial or through the the state. The film's denouement - the election and consequent celebration over the skies of Sao Paolo - offers are impressionist canvas for Let It Burn in its final frames, the presumed majority celebrates the new state official while the residents of this state-run hostile lay in a purgatory of uncertainty, the fear of being shoved aside and left without any means of support looms large in the days ahead.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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