Daisies + Ilha das Flores

Daisies (1966)
Dir. Vera Chytilová, 76min, DCP
With Jitka Cerhová, Ivana Karbanová, Julius Albert
In Czech with English subtitles

Adopting this insolent attitude as their guiding philosophy, a pair of hedonistic young women (both named Marie) embark on a gleefully debauched odyssey of gluttony, giddy destruction, and anti-patriarchal resistance, in which nothing is safe from their nihilistic pursuit of pleasure. Matching her anarchic message with an equally radical aesthetic, director Věra Chytilová, with the close collaboration of cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera, unleashes an optical storm of fluctuating film stocks, kaleidoscopic montages, cartoonish stop-motion cutouts, and surreal costumes designed by Ester Krumbachová, who also co wrote the script. The result is Daisies, the most defiant provocation of the Czechoslovak New Wave, an exuberant call to rebellion aimed squarely at those who uphold authoritarian oppression in any form.

---

Ilha das Flores 1989)
Dir. Jorge Furtado, 13min
In Portuguese with English subtitles

Ilha das Flores (Island of Flowers) depicts the life of a tomato as it journeys from a Japanese-run plantation to a supermarket, a middle-class Roman Catholic kitchen, a garbage can, and, finally, the ominous Brazilian island of garbage, Ilha das Flores. This short filmic parable presents the acidic, heartfelt journey of a spoiled tomato as a metaphor for the stark realities that delineate the various social fields imbricated in the consumerist landscape of the last century.