Flora
Dias

Flora Dias was born and raised in Jales, a small town on the banks of the Paraná River in Brazil. In the Tupi-Guarani indigenous language, Paraná means “similar to the sea,” a name that reflects the river’s vast scale. Originating in central Brazil, the Paraná flows southward, skirting Paraguay, crossing northern Argentina, and eventually merging with the Uruguay River to form the Río de la Plata, which empties into the Atlantic Ocean at the southernmost tip of the continent. A symbol of her origins, the Paraná not only embodies and translates much of the inner world that Flora Dias expresses in her work but also serves as a metaphor for her unique journey as a filmmaker, artist, and cinema researcher.

Along its expansive course, the waters of the Paraná nourish forests, farmlands, villages, and cities. In her artistic education—earning a degree in social communication from Fluminense Federal University (Brazil), specializing in image at the École nationale supérieure Louis-Lumière (France), and completing a master’s in visual arts at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro—Dias explored diverse landscapes, both natural and urban, each leaving its imprint on her creative vision. It is noteworthy that her first short film as a director, Praia de Botafogo (Botafogo Beach, Super 8mm, 2008), is set by the very ocean into which the Paraná flows.

From the heart of the continent to the coast, the Paraná converges with numerous other rivers: the Iguaçu, the Paranapanema, the Paraguay, and the Sucuriú. Like the river, Flora Dias has encountered many tributaries—fellow artists—along her journey, forming enduring and fruitful creative partnerships with filmmakers like Juliana Rojas, Caetano Gotardo, Matheus Parizi, and Sérgio Silva. Dias’s meticulous and sensitive eye for composition and visual storytelling has shaped a prolific career as a cinematographer, with over ten feature films and nearly twenty short films to her credit, many of which have been showcased at prestigious festivals such as Cannes, Rotterdam, Viennale, Turin, Hamburg, Tiradentes, Olhar de Cinema, BFI, and Clermont-Ferrand. Her curiosity and imaginative spirit have also led her in front of the camera, with acting roles in films like A alegria (The Joy, 2010) and A fuga da mulher gorila (The Escape of the Monkey Woman, 2009), directed by Marina Meliande and Felipe Bragança, two other creative collaborators.

Through consistent personal research, Flora Dias has developed an artistic-theoretical framework that profoundly engages with the foundations of Amerindian thought, transcending an objective perspective, blurring the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, and bringing new ways of understanding the relationships between humans, animals, and nature. These aspects are manifest, on different levels, in all of her work as a director and screenwriter.

Dias’s second feature film, O estranho (The Intrusion, 2023), premiered at the Berlinale Forum in 2023, won Best Film at both the Nuremberg International Human Rights Film Festival and Queer Lisboa 2023. The film exemplifies her collaborative ethos. Co-created with Juruna Mallon, with whom Dias previously co-directed and co-wrote her debut feature, O sol nos meus olhos (The Sun Against My Eyes, 2013), O estranho offers a profound exploration of a specific territory—the site of Guarulhos Airport—through an archaeological lens that layers historical timelines, uncovering narratives of resistance and ethnic resilience tied to the land. As Ana Flávia Gerhardt aptly observes, in O estranho, another river—this time, the Baquirivu-Guaçu—takes on the role of a protagonist: though channeled and nearly lifeless, it still exerts agency over those who connect with it, like a living entity.

“Rivers remember their paths” is the closing line of the video installation Enchant the Ghost (2021), recited by Desirée Pfenninger, another of Flora Dias’s creative partners. The piece draws parallels between fishing and filmmaking, highlighting the camaraderie that emerges between fishermen and filmmakers in their respective processes. This sense of connection is particularly evident in Dias’s collaborations with her family, as seen in the contemplative Ocidente (West, 2016), a work that highlights a sensitivity grounded in nostalgia and belonging, feelings that the filmmaker shared with her father, at sunset. In Miragem (Mirage, 2019), she examines themes of memory and identity through the intimate, on-camera relationship with her mother. Experimental shorts like Poema a 3 (Poem by 3, 2020) and Pytang (2020) serve as both research and artistic outcomes in Flora Dias’s creative journey.

In Wind Roads (unreleased), created during the Filming in the Amazon lab under the guidance of filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Dias intertwines experiences of belonging and exile across the Peruvian Amazon, the Siberian Taiga, and “her” Paraná River. Through dialogue and archival material, the film amplifies subtle yet profound connections between humans and their emotional landscapes.

In recent years, Flora Dias has deepened her exploration of her ancestral and indigenous roots, tracing her lineage to the Puri ethnic group. This research culminates in her third feature film, Flamboyants (unreleased), which blends fiction, essay, documentary, and observational cinema in an intra-family collaborative effort to reconstruct her family tree and reclaim her ethnic-cultural identity through the figure of her great-grandmother, Belmira. Like a river meandering through ever-shifting landscapes, Dias’s cinema roams the globe. Yet, as water inevitably carries the memory of its source, her cinema—nourished by countless tributaries—remains deeply rooted in its origins.

Text by Ester Fér