Dry Ground Burning

A gang of women steal oil from Brazilian pipelines, refining it into gas to be sold on the black market.

On a firelit night in an unnamed town, we see people taking oil from a tapped pipeline and pouring the stolen oil into containers. A gang of outlaws, primarily women, operate an illegal oil refinery in Brazil, in a favela, a slum near the city of Brasilia. Above the building is a flag that says, “The Oil is Ours.” The film is called Dry Ground Burning, written and directed by Adirley Queirós and Joana Pimenta, and it takes place during the recently ended reign of right wing nationalist president Jair Bolsonaro.

We first see Léa, a tough former drug dealer, when she returns home after serving a long prison sentence. Everything has gotten worse. The favela is now constantly patrolled by police helicopters. A huge new prison complex is being constructed there by incarcerated labor. Léa goes to work with her half sister Chitara, who is more low key, but is in fact the person who first thought of siphoning oil from pipelines and refining it into gasoline to be sold on the black market, with the local biker gang her primary customers. With the success of her pirate operation, Chitara has become legendary, with poor people in the slums actually singing songs about her. Chitara and Léa are daughters of a wily and brutal local gangster, now deceased, whom they reminisce about with a mixture of contempt and admiration.

Some of the women also work regular jobs, in a factory turning the wood being cut every day from the Amazon rain forest into building materials. The film intently and patiently depicts the experience of physical labor. The life of poverty we witness is one where there is little freedom to consider higher goals than survival. One of the women, Andreia, belongs, along with other characters, to a small Pentecostal church where the affirmation of Jesus’ power provides a sense of purpose otherwise lacking. But this turns out to be a glimpse from Andreia’s past. In the present she’s an activist for a group called PPP: the Prison People’s Party, which opposes the theft of national resources and destruction of the environment by the owning class.

Queirós and Pimenta defy the usual narrative techniques. They use a steady focused approach showing the entire environment of a scene at length rather than chopping it up. The film is constructed with a kind of intentional disorder, a documentary type realism combined with improvisation by non-professional actors, with the main ones actually playing versions of themselves, even stepping out of character at times to talk about their real lives outside the film. Everyone chain smokes. The night scenes are an incredibly vivid display of black and gold.

We also follow a miserable group of policemen in an armored vehicle patrolling the favela at night with guns drawn and a little drone leading the way. One extended sequence takes place at a real life Bolsonaro rally where we witness the mindless slogans and rituals of this neo-fascist mass movement. The gas hustlers are a counter to all this, as is the film itself. And as dangerous and dirty as their lives are, they represent the power of indigenous people, the poor, and the people of color. Dry Ground Burning is a bold film about a world on fire.