M HKA Ensembles

Video, 00:44:00.

Collection: Courtesy of the Artist and Galeria Vermelho.

Vera Cruz is an experimental film that began with the idea of making an imaginary documentary about the April 1500 conquering of Brazil by Portuguese conquistadors. Based on the famous letter sent by the explorer Pero Vaz de Caminha to King Manuel I of Portugal, one of the very few documents about the discovery, Vera Cruz is presented as an ‘impossible film’; impossible because the event predated the invention of film by several centuries and thus no recording existed; impossible because all we have is one man’s subjective report; and because dialogue between the Portuguese and the Indians could not have happened. We see only image of film stock that has gradually degraded over 500 years. The verbal report of the journey across the Atlantic has also worn away to be replaced by fragmented subtitles. Moving between fiction and documentary, only the evocative sound of the sea and the wind remain constant.