Screened together with Ella Lingens

Fordlandia Malaise is a film about the memory and the present of Fordlandia, the company town founded by Henry Ford in the Amazon rain forest in 1928. Ford’s aim was to break the British rubber monopoly and produce this material in Brazil for his car production in the United States. The remains of the construction site testify to the scale of the failure of this neocolonialist endeavor that lasted less than a decade.

Nowadays, Fordlandia is a space suspended between times, between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, between utopia and dystopia, between visibility and invisibility: architectural buildings of steel, glass, and masonry still remain in use while traces of indigenous life left no marks on the ground.

Although Fordlandia is well known due to the brief Fordian period, one must not forget the history either before or after. Giving voice to the inhabitants who claim the right to write their own story and reject the ghost town label, Fordlandia Malaise blends together archival imagery, drone footage, tales and narratives, myths and songs.