President Obama And The Giant Pteropods
Tuesday, March 13, 2012

By Daniel de la Calle

 

A couple news for the first half of the week:

»US President Barak Obama's weekly address this past Saturday was a remarkable attempt at pushing for a more environmental and alternative energy agenda while making it sound like the opposite.  Speaking from a jet-engine factory Mr. Obama seemed to be talking about aircraft manufacture on American soil, about national oil production being at an 8-year high and about the opening of millions of acres for oil drilling, but all that wrapping was the necessary "spoonful of sugar" to once again try to make the renewable, clean and efficient energy "medicine" go down the reluctant American public.  It is worth watching everywhere, here in Europe as well; we are talking about the place where 20% of the world's oil gets burned:


»Sculptor Cornelia Kubler Kavanagh recently created "The Pteropod Project: Charismatic Microfauna", a series of 12 sculptures enlarged over 3,000 times of our friend and co-protagonist in A Sea Change, the "winged foot" pteropod.  To make it come to life she collaborated with Dr. Gareth Lawson, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Read an essay by Ms. Kubler on The Pteropod Project HERE

If you live in NYC you will also have the chance to see the exhibit at the Blue Mountain Gallery May 22 - June 16 2012.

© 2011 Cornelia Kubler Kavanagh. All Rights Reserved

 

»A SEA CHANGE screening in Kansas City tonight (Tuesday March 13t) at 7PM, at the Bragg Auditorium (All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church).
DIRECTIONS
Reconsider Your Shrimp
Thursday, February 23, 2012
By Daniel de la Calle

» Williams College, in Williamstown, Mass. is hosting an Oceans Symposium and next Monday, Feb. 27, at 7 p.m., Elizabeth Kolbert, staff writer at The New Yorker, will lead a discussion following a showing of A Sea Change, Imagine a World Without Fish.

» Beautiful new documentary on the oceans is out this year: The Last Reef, Cities Beneath The Sea. Go to their website (www.thelastreef.co.uk) and read how this project, that started out as a 3D "macro movie based in Palau", turned into an alarm call on the biggest threat to coral reefs worldwide: Ocean Acidification.


» Reconsider your shrimp.  A one pound bag of frozen shrimp raised on a typical Asian fish farm produces an astounding one ton of CO2.  At a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science biologist J. Boone Kauffman (Oregon State University) developed the comparison to help the public understand the environmental impact of land use decisions.  "The carbon footprint of the shrimp from this land use is about 10-fold greater than the land use carbon footprint of an equivalent amount of beef produced from a pasture formed from a tropical rainforest."
Mr. Kauffman said 50 to 60 percent of shrimp farms are located in tidal zones in Asian countries, mostly on cleared mangrove forests.  The farms are inefficient, producing just one kilogram of shrimp for 13.4 square meters of mangrove, while the ponds created are abandoned in just three to nine years because disease, soil acidification and contamination destroy them.  After abandonment, the soil takes 35 to 40 years to recover.
LINK to the original article, from Agence France Presse.

» Lecture on Ocean Acidification and the Future of Native Oysters in California Estuaries taking place tomorrow, February 24, at noon at Stanford University. It is sponsored by Hopkins Marine Station. More info HERE.

» And from the other side of the Atlantic, "Analyses of the effects of Ocean Acidification on the larval development of Crassostrea gigas", AKA Pacific oyster on Ms. Patrícia Barros Masters Theses. Info HERE.

» New video filled with European flair on Ocean Acidification, the EPOCA program and the public's awareness on the issue.


» Post Doctoral position at IMR.  The Institute of Marine Research has a 3 year position as postdoctoral researcher on the effects of Ocean Acidification on marine zoooplankton, with special emphasis on krill. The position is located in Bergen, Norway. Find out about qualifications and further details HERE.

» The Second UK Ocean Acidification Research Programme annual science meeting will take place at the University of Exeter from Monday, April 16th to Wednesday, April 18th.  If you are a UKOARP particiant you can register online HERE.  For further reading, click HERE.
Screening at the Oil Company
Sunday, January 30, 2011
By Daniel de la Calle
from Ipanema Beach, Brazil

This past Friday the 28th A Sea Change screened at the CENPES center in Rio de Janeiro.  It is a massive 25 acre complex that employs over 1,500 biologists, chemists, marine ecologists and engineers working in interdisciplinary groups at the Petrobras headquarters, one of the leading research centers of its kind in the world. Here »

they are studying all renewable energy sources, from wind to geothermal, from cell batteries to biodiesel (Brazil is arguably the leading nation on sugarcane biodiesel tech).
Heading up Guanabara Bay from downtown Ipanema Beach I had two reasons for concern about the morning ahead:
first, I wondered how many of these scientists would show up for a 9AM screening made public via internal emails in these empty and distracted weeks before Carnival, and second, what their response to a film so openly opposed to the use of fossil fuels would be.  Fortunately, my friend Suzana Sattamini had once again done a fantastic job and the results were simply outstanding.  We had an almost full house watching our documentary and half the audience stayed throughout the 40 minutes of fruitful Q&A (see picture).

My overall impression is that everyone devoting time and attention into the current environmental situation is more or less under a similar frame of mind: our impact on nature is too obvious to go unnoticed; we are all concerned and looking for answers, for ways of improving and moving away from a technology that has been fruitful in uncountable ways, but that is finite and has had tremendous impact on the planet. During most of the XXth century we were not aware of just how serious that poisoning was, partly thanks to the natural CO2 sequestration the oceans were doing for the atmosphere, but out of knowledge comes responsibility and to continue following the same path is simply unacceptable.  I am not stating that this is the way Petrobras as a stately run company sees the industry it is a part of, but, putting aside possible twisted interpretations of PR work, the fact that companies like Petrobras are investing so heavily on clean tech, on research and into other sources of power is a clear indicator that they are aware and looking ahead.

After the screening we went to visit a sculpture Suzana and other Brazilian artists have created and that was recently inaugurated inside Cenpes last year. It is a spiral of life that chronologically shows all eras of life in this planet. Each one is represented by an animal that at some point inhabited the land that we now call Brazil:

from Precambrian, through Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous (with the only life sized creature, a 5 ft wing spanned dragonfly), Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Tertiary all the way to "our" Quaternary with some human footprints (Suzana's husband Paulo's).
Let's aim for a "Quinternary" that does not have a shameful human footprint.
When You Reach Maturity
Monday, October 04, 2010
By Daniel de la Calle

A couple blog entries ago I mentioned A Sea Change has been present so far at more than fifty film festivals worldwide.  We have a saying in Spanish that goes: "life is but a sigh", partly to show our tragic sense of life, but mainly to stress its brevity.  The documentary that Barbara finished not long ago is reaching maturity and quietly beginning a new life, one where film festival attendances become a bit more apart, where we, the Niijii Films crew, can witness how it's firmly established itself as the filmic source of reference in all matters ocean acidification.  This is by no means a sign of decay but, quite on the contrary, an indication of its health and the natural progress of things.  And you could be of so much help in the weeks, months and years to come.  How?:
Just two days ago a person that attended our April screening in Sao Paulo wrote asking permission to organize one himself at local MAUA School of Technology.  It fills me with pride to know that that event and the after talk about individual initiatives stayed with Alberto Galvão Branco and now that he sees a chance to do something he has not wasted a minute to contact us.  You could do the very same thing, whether it is at a local college, and environmental organization near your home, a municipal auditorium or space that sits empty most days.  Read HERE, it is quite simple.  It will become the perfect excuse to see friends, build your community, eat something together afterward, become actively engaged in solving the problems that concern you, feel so so helpful.  Plus, it releases lots of endorphins.
If you have any questions that are not answered on our website, do not hesitate to email me:
aseachangedocumentary@gmail.com
Thank you.



I cycle by the shore every morning,
the Mediterranean there was, the Mediterranean there is
We Need Your Help!
Thursday, September 30, 2010
We've just received word from Netflix that A Sea Change is officially a 'saved' film in their terminology. This means that they're waiting to see how many people put it in their queue before they decide if they'll carry it. With over 50 film festivals worldwide, a national broadcast on Planet Green and hundreds of community screenings we're curious what it takes to get accepted outright. But Netflix has a big audience and we want more people to see the film and learn about ocean acidification, so we see this as a challenge to our network of supporters...you.  If you have a Netflix account or know someone who does, please take a minute to put us in your queue and to ask your friends to do the same thing. It's free, it's easy and it will make a difference. Here's our link

Speaking of documentary film festivals, Barbara and Sven just returned (briefly) home after attending the screening of their film at the Chesapeake Film Festival, while here at the virtual office we were informed that the film had been selected for the Festival du Film de L'environnement in Kairouan, Tunisia, in early December. How nice is that?
Back to Brazil, back to FICA
Friday, July 09, 2010
By Daniel de la Calle

I really wanted to visit some of the cerrado National Parks during the screening tour in Brazil in March and April, but it was not possible.  The dates did not leave a window of time big enough to "escape" to the countryside between each city.   I thought it would be a long time before I had another chance to fly to South America and fulfill this desire, but I was so wrong.  Not even a week after my return to the US the production company received an invitation to take part in FICA again, the film festival that A Sea Change won last year, this time as part of a series of films to be screened for school children from the State of Goias.  I wrote to the organizers and suggested we did a little more than just show the film; I wanted to go down there and meet them, talk to them about ocean acidification and do a simple chemistry experiment to exemplify what an acidic ocean does to shell forming organisms.  They liked the idea and so it was that, barely a month after leaving Río, that I was heading South again on an early June night.

My expectations were very high, but even so the cerrado did not disappoint me at all. It is wild, it is pure, it is extremely beautiful, bizarre and surprising. Animals, birds and plants seem to have come out of a Dr. Seuss book.  The giant anteater with its long hairs, nose and tongue, the toucans and parrots, the palms, sticky plants, fragrant leaves, thorny bushes. Everything was new and unique to me.  And for good reason, forty some percent of all I saw was endemic;  this ecosystem is so important that, in a country like Brazil that holds the Amazon jungle, the cerrado still counts for over thirty percent of all the biodiversity in the nation.  The big threat to these gorgeous savannas and bushy areas are the dry season fires and the clearings done for soy and cattle farming.  Fires are strictly forbidden, but one would think that they are actually encouraged. Everywhere I went people were burning grass and low bush by the side of the road, in farms, in the forests.  This practice could not be more dangerous.  The dry season lasts half of the year and usually, once a fire gets out of control during these months there is absolutely no way people will manage to stop it. Some plants have adapted to fires and have the most ingenious ways of "escaping" or surviving fires, but many others and all animals caught in it perish and take an awful long time to repopulate the area because conditions in the cerrado are extreme and hard (six months of rain, six months of "seca", the dry season).  I came to realize that legislation is not going to do much to discourage "winter" burnings, that the only way to dissuade Brazilians from eradicating the mato is to educate them, to teach them to love this magnificent environment that they take for granted and to teach them about the consequences of fires. The cerrado, as I have already mentioned on previous posts in this blog, is the most threatened environment in all Brazil, way above the Amazonia.

Education has always looked to me like the only true key to hope and change in all matters, including the way we treat the planet, so I was elated to have the opportunity to show the film to 500 kids and talk to them for a couple minutes. There were children and teenagers of all ages, from 5 to 17. They were loud, they were having fun, they were nervous. The room was huge, it is the same one used for the Festival's closing ceremony, but in less than five minutes it filled up. They were making so much noise during the opening scene that you could not hear a thing. How loud were they? About this LOUD

Unfortunately, some of them had to leave before it was over because they had come by bus from distant towns and villages and had to begin their way back, but a good number of them stayed until the end.  I had promised to ask a few simple questions about the film and reward those that knew the answers with some of our merchandise, so the kids (and quite many adults) were pretty excited.  I also asked the younger children to please make a drawing with whatever part of the documentary or animal shown in it that they liked and we quickly assembled an informal jury to reward the best five or six with a Niijii Films baseball cap as well.  I wished I had brought 100 and not just a handful, it was heartbreaking to see some of those disappointed eyes. The most difficult question I asked seemed to be to name in an understandable way the little shell with wings that appears several times throughout the film.  The word "pteropod" is not the easiest one to pronounce for a 12 year old Brazilian kid; some pretty comical and unintelligible replies, formed mostly by the urge to own a baseball cap, came out of those mouths.  Finally, I told them all to come close to the stage and hold two cups in their hands, one filled with water and one filled with vinegar. Then we gave each one of them several pieces of chalk while I explained that they should imagine the acidic ocean being the cup of vinegar and the shell forming organism being the pieces of chalk. There was some initial confusion because the chalk was bubbling in the water as well as in the vinegar, but once the air inside it had come out they could see the vinegar getting all murky and the chalk stick slowly dissolving. I knew all this was quite a stretch for a little girl that has never seen the ocean or eaten shellfish and is at the beginning of her school years, but I think they got the essence of the message and both students and teachers were absolutely fascinated by the chemistry behind the terrible problem of ocean acidification. I believe and hope the experiment is going to be replicated in classrooms during the next few months.

Here are a few of the drawings I took with me, all of them winners of the Niijii Films cap that is now often seen around the State of Goias:
Bicycle Interview
Saturday, May 29, 2010
By Daniel de la Calle

Barbara and Sven returned from the West Coast a few days back and this past Thursday Sven and I had a chance to go on a morning ride, discuss how Liquigas was doing in the Giro de Italia and talk about the 2010 NOAA Environmental Hero Award ceremony in La Jolla, CA.
"Thanks" to some stomach problems this spring (or so he claims) Sven is looking lean and mean and was able to talk even when the road got steep.

"It was exciting to be out there," he said.  "Obviously, it is a delight when you work hard and try to pull the best team together to make a film to in the end get this kind of recognition.  We are lucky to have Barbara as a director.  She is a good storyteller so the rest of us did what we were told and tried to do it well."


From left to right, Tony Haymet, Dick Feely, Barbara Ettinger and Sven Huseby

"The evening started with a slideshow with clips from the film and Youtube pieces related to the history of the film, television shows where it had appeared and those sort of things. There was a major buffet and soon after the ceremony.
Dick Feely came down from the Seattle office of NOAA to present the award on behalf of Doctor Jane Lubchenko, the Administrative Director of NOAA. She is a woman with deep knowledge of ocean acidification as a result of her work at Oregon State University," said Sven.  
"After the award ceremony we had a screening of the full 83 minute version of the documentary for the 250 attendees and finally a q&a with Barbara and myself, Andrew Dickson, Tony Haymet and Victoria Fabry."

I did not recognize a couple of the names, so Sven, water bottle in his hand, explained: "Tony Haymet is the president of Scripps. Andrew Dickson is known as the man who came up with a standardized way of calibrating instruments to measure pH levels around the world seas, whether it is Japan, Norway, Australia or the United States. And Victoria Fabry, or Vicky Fabry as we know her, is the scientist who was originally interviewed by Elizabeth Kolbert in her seminal article for the November 2006 issue of the New Yorker titled "The Darkening Sea".  It is always a treat to catch up with Vicky."

"The best part of getting an award like this is you can leverage it into more publicity and greater milage for the film," he concluded.
Sao Paulo de Janeiro
Thursday, May 20, 2010
By Daniel de la Calle

It is 60 degrees, cloudy and windy at times and I am listening to the National's new record surrounded by maple, oak and pine tress in my office.  No more Tim Maia, Marisa Monte, funky carioca or forró.  No more Os Mutantes.  I will need to close my eyes really tight to remember what it was and felt like 5,000 miles further South, over in Brazil.  Right now Barbara and Sven are on the West Coast receiving their Environmental Hero Award from NOAA and visiting Elias and his family while back here in NY we received this past week news of three broadcasts on Norwegian national television, NRK (which made Sven particularly happy), and of the screening at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Vancouver.  The Vancouver Observer did a nice little piece about it that you can read here.

The penultimate screening was at the Cineclube Socioambiental Crisantempo in Vila Madalena.  Vila Madalena fools you into thinking that the gigantic city that envelops it does not exist.  It is a beautiful neighborhood with posh restaurants, bars with terraces, boutiques, artists' studios, bakeries.  If you are rich in Sao Paulo, you want to hang out around Vila Madalena and forget about the traffic jams, the hectic Avenida Paulista, the putrid Pinheiros River, the more than 20 million people around. Crisantempo offers a fantastic space in which to host film, theatre, dance and music performances.  It is all very well organized and cared for, all extremely professional.  Everybody talks about the city being the engine of South America, more cosmopolitan, faster paced and wealthier than anywhere else in the continent and I guess it is true.  For me it was a relief to have the last screenings being a little less stressful and unpredictable.  In preparation for our night the organizers had contacted Leandra Gonçalves from Greenpeace Brasil to be present during the Q&A.  That gave me the opportunity to not have to listen so much to myself again and learn some very interesting things about the attempts (or lack thereof) in Brazil to preserve coastal waters and marine ecosystems.  Although I had already noticed how much meat is eaten everywhere, I was surprised to know that the average consumption per capita of fish in Brazil barely reaches 8 kilograms (it is 58 kilograms over in Spain, but we might only be beat by Japan in our dependency and love for fish).  It is a bit of a paradox that a country so associated with sandy beaches and coconut groves, surfing, water and nature can literally have its back turned in another direction if we just look at their national policies and their diet.  Ms Gonçalves was very keen to talk about whales (a symbol for Greenpeace), so took the opportunity to tell the audience that one of the possible future lines of research in regards to ocean acidification and marine life could be  the impact a more acidic ocean will have on animals that communicate through sound underwater.  One of the lesser known facts about acidification is that a decrease of 0.3 in the PH equals a 40% decrease in the sound absorption coefficient.  Yes, there could be acoustic contamination in the oceans as well.


100 different types of fruit at the Municipal Market in Sao Paulo.


In a city like Sao Paulo some of the favelas are vertical. Outside the Municipal Market.

Then it was time to go back to Río, catch a few more waves on Ipanema beach, watch the city at sunset from Sugar Loaf, buy a kilo of powdered guaraná and go to the final screening, at the Solar da Imperatriz in the Jardim Botanico;  no less!



 The place was also known as Facenda dos Macacos, after the river that passes through it, but either macaques really liked the name or I want to believe their profusion had something to do with it as well.  They run up and down electric wires, roll on roofs, feed along the fences, curious and nervous, mothers carrying several offspring on the backs. With those curled up tails, hanging at different heights, they looked like musical notes on a score to the Mata Atlântica.



The somewhat long drive up to this lush location in the outskirts of Rio did not prevent the screening form going really well.  Cecilia Herzog from Inverde and her husband Alex (Amigos do Parque) were in charge of the whole thing and through their hard work, devotion and energy made sure that it all run smoothly, in a brilliant manner.  The most positive thing about this trip has certainly been meeting people like them and like Fabiana Duarte de Paula, Eudaldo Guimaraes, Ana Arruda, Suzana Sattamini, Pedro Cavalcanti, Natalia Ribeiro, Andrea Palatnik, Luciano Mariz, Gina Boemer or so many other amazing folks that I am surely forgetting now and have shown to me such conviction and hope in change, such great generosity and will to help, sharing their energy and intelligence for this project.  They have restored my at times damaged faith in human kind.

This time at the end we had a panel discussion with journalist Amélia Gonzales from O Globo and oceanographer David Zee from the University Veiga de Almeida and the collaboration from members of the audience, like Trajano Paiva, who runs a website devoted to the oceans called sosoceanos.org.
What a great aftertaste to six fantastic weeks in Brazil.  And now for something completely different.

This post is dedicated to my good friend Miguel Gil, who helped me throughout the whole trip, shared the laughter, joys and miseries that come from traveling and just yesterday experienced the tragedy of his half of the cupuaçu cracking in the dry Granada air.  We will go and get some more, Miguel.
Into the Cerrado
Friday, May 14, 2010
By Daniel de la Calle

The screening in Goiania marked the beginning of my last week in Brazil. I sped up the visits to the açai na tigela parlor, tried to look more closely at plants in the parks and to spot all the macaques on the electric wires; ay! so many things I would not be able do back home. It was also the time to revisit the places and people I met last year on my first visit to the country.
 
Goiania is not pleasing to the eye, no. No historical landmarks, no beautiful neighborhoods, no pretty avenues, no magnificent gardens, no cultural life to speak of. It feels provincial, but is home to 1.5 million people. Still, locals are proud and quick to tell you that year after year it is labeled one of the top two cities to live in Brazil and also that its beautiful women, seven to every man, are famous nationwide. Now, this is something people from Minas Gerais strongly disagree about, but I want to believe goianienses.
Goias' wealth comes from cattle and farming (primarily soy) and from the car industry. These activities seem to be putting tremendous pressure on the "cerrado" ecosystem, making it the most threatened area in all Brazil, above the Amazon. It is always tragic to see or hear of an endangered environment, but with the "brazilian savannah" this is even more the case, because walking or driving through it is where I have seen the most beautiful landscapes in the tropics.



The cerrado is both open and bushy to the point of being dense, jungly with abundant and unique varieties of trees and birds. At times it resembles a garden of Eden, a primeval forest that has not seem man yet. Everywhere you see red termite mounds, wild grass and scattered endemic palms that break the tree line deciding to reach up higher.



Toucans, araras and other smaller birds feast on the different kinds of dates and tiny coconut-looking seeds they produce. The plants are striking, many twist around in still violence, a testimony to the six months without rain. They are resinous and fragrant and bear unique fruits that locals eat in popular dishes and ice cream. My beloved pequi would deserve a whole paragraph, but I know I am already overextending myself here, so I will leave it to your curiosity and to Wikipedia to find out more. Love pequi. Love love love it.


Was it a dream or did three blue and golden araras just fly over our heads?

We arrived by car from Brasilia the afternoon of the screening. On this occasion I had no worries as to how things would turn out: this is the city where I know the most people in the country and I had had so much help from everyone to promote the event and send out emails that I felt calm. Eudaldo Guimaraes deserves special praise and a huge thank you for all his help providing contact information for so many crucial people around the country, not just in Goiania, and for sending me many copies in different formats of the Portuguese subtitled version of the film. What a man, the kind you need if you were to begin to losing hope in humankind.  Anyway, the screening went very smoothly, with a really pleasant vibe among the audience and the Q & A stretched itself into almost infinity. Yes, Brazilians really love to engage in the art of conversation, adore acquiring information, socializing and listening to their own beautiful voices and language. I myself felt somewhat awkward. The cinema was rather long and narrow and I must have suffered from flight attendant complex; it was also weird to talk in front of friends in a more formal manner and with a microphone. Still, it was a success and it sure feels sensational to get such a shower of kind words of praise and good intentions on behalf of the A Sea Change crew. All those men and women, all the kids that came to the screenings clearly see the flaws and want a better world, a society more respectful towards nature where the real priorities are put at the top of the list. I am not much of a believer in large groups of people and majorities, but stand fully convinced most people in the world want exactly that. That question Sven so emphatically asks in the film (man, after seeing it 20 times it seems to be engraved in my brain!) comes to my mind: "Why is it so hard?" I think we have to be louder, because we are more and we want the right thing.

As an anecdote, it was in Goiania where I for once had no clue what to respond to a question from the audience. Someone raised his hand and asked why o why Barbara Ettinger had chosen so and so font on the film, what the meaning behind it was. Boy did that catch me off guard. It is quite a testimony about how shameless ("cara de pau" in Portuguese, "caradura" in Spanish) I have become during these past five weeks: to be able to answer all possible questions about ocean acidity, global environmental policies, biodiversity or the future of the planet and only choke when when we finally stepped into the kingdom of typography.

A final note: the next morning I was very fortunate to attend a private screening of the film Oceans in its original hoarse and sexy French version. It is an absolute feast to the eyes, I strongly encourage you to go see it if you get the chance. This is the French site with the trailer:

Ω


The last sunset, on the way to Sao Paulo
Understanding Hens
Saturday, May 01, 2010
By Daniel de la Calle

Brazilians do not like Brasilia, Brasilienses do. I guess it must be the LA of the Southern Hemisphere.

Brasilia was conceived after a dream, but some think of it as a vision, even see it as a prophecy.  In the mid 18th century some Salesian priest in Italy (!) prophesied a new civilization would emerge in Brazil, somewhere between the 15th and 20th parallels.  Unsurprisingly, that left the country's ego in quite a healthy state and ruminating on some preexisting ideas about creating a new capital.  President Juscelino Kubitschek finally decided in the 50s that the time was then and that is the simple explanation to how one of the most chaotic, improvisational and unreliable countries and societies in the world embarked on building the most orderly and German/Swiss, square, almost robotic, capital ever conceived and constructed.  Of course, in order to make the enterprise absolutely maddening, mythical and megalomaniac the project had to be fulfilled from scratch in less than four years and in the middle of the "Brazilian savannah", the already dream-like looking Cerrado.  As a consequence of this a big portion of the expense of building Brasilia came from having to fly all the materials to the chosen spot while the roads were built. 

The city is vast, open, beautiful, inhumane, majestic, in decay. It is like an architectural theme park (or more like a rendering of Oscar Niemeyer's brain), a vision that once was considered futuristic, never got to really be seen as contemporary and now is radically retro (I call it "the future that never was").  Which explains why it is at the same time fascinating, gorgeous and repulsive, something that in my sick mind translates as addictive. 

The smooth concrete is cracking after 50 repetitions of six months of rain and six of sun. It is not so white or gray any more, some portions have fallen like breadcrumbs, sections of stained glass in the buildings, churches and cathedral are gone; the endless lawns are a battlefield where nature fruitlessly tries to claim some of its territory back: there is an army of ants with weed-wackers, leaf blowers and helmets, so things still look smooth, open. Here the car is king and pedestrians just lonely antelopes ready to be torn and devoured by bumpers and wheels, with nowhere to hide or to even find shade.  Wonder how many Brasilienses walk to work. 

Distances are so great and the extreme logic of the layout of streets, street "names", blocks and buildings so perfect that the mind cannot cling on to any crevice, any irregularity in this absurd maze of letters, numbers and things that look the same but are miles away from one another.  Was I already here?  Am I supposed to be here?  Where was I going anyway?

55 years ago there was only bush, not a soul or building.  Now there are thousands of miles of roads, two huge artificial lakes and officially about 3 million people, but I think we can quietly double that figure.

The two times I have come to Brasilia the air was incredibly clean and dry. Because of the altitude and latitude there is an marvelous quality to the light. The colors seem over saturated and the skies are the most spectacular in the world. If you ever go to Brasilia, please do so in the dry season and do not forget your polarized sunglasses. It is one of the most photogenic places I have been to, makes me wish I was a fashion photographer.

I paid little attention to Ana Arruda when two months ago she told me that she was trying to set up the screening at the Museu Nacional.  A name is a name and only when I was in Brasilia I started wondering if the Museu Nacional was THE Museu Nacional.  It turned out it was and I felt a bit overwhelmed to be in such an iconic space with the film. The Museu Nacional was only built in 2006, but because it came out of Niemeyer's brain it seems as if it was done together with the rest of the monumental area.

Freaked out by a less than successful experience in Fortaleza a few days before we embarked in a 24 hour promotional tour where we contacted and harassed everyone we knew, sent emails left and right, spoke to newspapers and websites and begged guys at surf shops to come to the screening.  Ana had done an incredible and generous job and the power of the internet really shone that evening.  I guess in every trip there is a defining time, a lasting image, in every life a sweet moment of success.  The place where I laid my first perfect and round egg was Brasilia. Here it is for you to see (I am so proud), the egg:



Not only was the space great, the projector fine, the sound fantastic, but we also had a more than full house with people sitting on the floor.  Oh, I get emotional just remembering it.  Victory!  People applauded enthusiastically, almost everyone stayed for the loooooong batepapo (chat, q&a) and the questions were good, the talk smooth and poignant. We were at the nation's capital and I was fully aware that it was going to be the best night in the whole tour, so I enjoyed it "live". The Museu Nacional belonged to A Sea Change for one night.



"Future, future, looks are all that matters"… but people still live here. And where there are people and movies are shown there has to be some popcorn (pipocas). We are so similar to chickens after all.



And a link to Francisco Neto's blog, who attended the screening:
http://sustenteconsciencia.blogspot.com/2010/04/mares-acidos.html

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