BBFF2021 Meet the Filmmaker: Yoni Goldstein and Meredith Zielke
A Machine to Live In is a documentary feature about cosmic dreams and mystical architecture at the heart of Brazil’s remote wilderness.
Through an emergent polyphonic text composed of four historical personalities, the film moves from the hyper-designed, space-age city of Brasília to the vast and flourishing landscape of UFO cults, spiritist temples, and utopian outposts.
We spoke to co-director Yoni Goldstein about the similarities between modern architecture and science fiction and the importance of utopian endeavours.
Screening at Palace Cinemas Byron Bay
Monday 20 December at 4:15pm
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Is this the first time you have worked together, how did this collaboration come about?
A Machine to Live In manifested itself through a core collective representing multiple domains of artistic production: Yoni and Meredith (with a background in cinema and fine arts), Andrew Benz (the director of photography and executive producer), and Sebastian Alvarez (a visual and performance artist and scholar).
All of us have worked together in the past on fine art and experimental media productions, including large scale moving image ‘tableux vivants’ and other time-based artworks. Our core team connected our media practices with Brazilian architects, designers, mystics, poets, astronomers, and ethnomusicologists. Each represented a portal of thought through which we could articulate a fragment of a visitation. A discrete perspective on a fractured whole.
When thinking about Brazil, utopian architecture and UFO cults are generally not the first things that come to mind. How was A Machine to Live In conceived?
The film has multiple points of origins. One of our primary entryways was Clarice Lispector's chronicle of Brasília's inauguration, a city willed into sudden existence in the remote hinterlands of Brazil. Her writing describes a psychic shock, inchoate totalitarian impulses and ancient cosmologies coursing through the architecture itself.
Our personal histories, in both Brazil and other hyper-designed modernist spaces, combined with Lispector's ambient mythos produced a generative meta-text about the possibilities of different worlds emerging from the built environment.
On the one hand, of course the cult of transdimensional space-time travellers is unexpected, difficult to conceive. On the other, what else can we expect when dreams of social order are so unstable and unequal? When we can no longer suffer this world, we dream of others. The worlds we encountered as we were shooting the film did not have to conform to any set logic, they existed in their own cosmos.
The film explores how the Brasília region became home to a number of new religions, cults, and transcendental movements. Have any other films explored this previously, and if so, were you influenced by them?
Modernist architecture as a stand-in for a science fiction future, with all its cosmic potential and ruptures of irrationality and unreality, is common enough in cinema. Once we trained our lenses at the city, we understood instantly that science fiction was in the frame already.
The subject matter of new religions in the satellite cities surrounding Brasília is relatively under-represented and often depicted derisively in television programs. We were interested in looking at these communities as dialectical and world historical, meaning they were in material conversation with the forces of power that shaped Brasília and its monumental designs. To that end, we were influenced more by texts such as Alternative Modernities by James Holston and the post-exotic literature of Antoine Volodine.
Is this the first architectural oriented film you have created?
Indeed it is! We can make arguments for previous works that have examined space or regarded buildings as characters, but for the most part, this is the mostly truly architecture forward film we've worked on.
What kind of impact do you hope the film will achieve?
We hope the film will creep into your subconscious the next time you encounter one of its many vectors. When you see Clarice Lispector on the shelf of your local bookstore, or watch images of Brasília in the next round of elections. It is a film about transcendence we hope will transcend the film itself.
A Machine to Live In is a very abstract film. What were the biggest challenges you faced when making it?
A Machine to Live In is an atypical film. One of its purposes was to attack the strictures of conventional documentary modes, to favour a drifting, collectivised, and fractured perspective.
The challenge was to discover this as a process. The images and events had to be gathered first, sifted through, then written about. We spent many years simply opening the film and looking inside, reconstructing its mechanisms, reflecting on it and thinking about all the ways it could be different.
As people become more environmentally conscious, do you think there will be a resurgence in utopian architecture which addresses this concern?
We certainly hope so, but we are cautious about the future. The aim of the film is not to criticize the utopian endeavours of the past, but to reckon with the lack of utopian projects in the present.
To your knowledge, has the film attracted much attention from the Brazilian government?
From the government itself? No. The film has been seen in Brazil and it seems to be divisive, especially between the generations.
Do you intend to create any films which explore other architecturally renowned parts of the world?
We would like to continue generating films out of our experience in Brazil, ideally one more project about Brasília with our director of photography.
What’s next, do you have any upcoming projects or films planned?
I, Yoni, am shooting as a cinematographer on a film about the legacy of uranium mining in the Navajo Nation. We are filming in infrared and exploring ideas about ecological collapse and invisible forces.
With so many film festivals having transitioned to virtual screenings due to the COVID-19 pandemic, what does it mean for you to have this film showing in front of live audiences? Were there any other deciding factors in choosing to show the film at BBFF?
We dearly miss the collective experience of cinema. That is absolutely critical for a film like ours, which was designed from the start to be an enveloping, sensorial event.
We hope that next year we can attend BBFF in person! Regardless, we are honoured to have the opportunity to show A Machine to Live In in front of a live audience. Thank you!