Balomania

Balomania

Dok Leipzig Film Festival

VERDICT: In this fascinating and visually dazzling debut feature, Danish documentary maker Sissel Morell Dargis embeds herself in Brazil's secretive underground subculture of illegal hot air balloon gangs.

Brazil’s baloeiro subculture is perfect for the big screen. It revolves around visually dazzling hand-crafted hot air balloons, some as tall as 100 metres, often carrying a mighty payload of fireworks and colourful banners the size of football fields. This age-old tradition has also been illegal for decades, and is run by a clandestine brotherhood who are deeply suspicious of outsiders, which makes Danish-made documentary Balomania all the more impressive. Shooting on and off over a decade, first-time feature director Sissel Morell Dargis embedded herself in the scene, gradually befriending and winning the trust of wary insiders, conversing with them in fluent Portuguese.

The result is a raw, unashamedly partisan but highly engaging film, shining a light on a communal folk-art phenomenon that is largely unknown outside Brazil. This story has an unavoidably political subtext, with Dargis framing the baloeiro scene as a hotbed of anti-authoritarian underclass defiance, hence its outlaw status. Working in computer games as well as film, the director has also designed a game titled Cai Cai Balão, which casts the balloon gangs as swashbuckling heroes. Building on its healthy festival run, Balomania screens in Dok Leipzig this week in the program sidebar dedicated to Doc Alliance network nominees.

Rooted in Catholic church rituals imported by Portuguese colonisers, Brazil’s hot air balloon culture is a centuries-old tradition initially held every June to honour the Saints Anthony, Peter and John. Modern-day baloeiros still routinely perform The Lord’s Prayer to bless each launch, but the scene long ago assumed a secular cult-like dimension of its own. First blossoming in the impoverished favelas and working-class suburbs of Rio in the 1960s and 1970s, it then spread to São Paulo and other cities. The icons that these surreal, magical, man-made UFOs now celebrate are more likely to be fictional film characters, actors, musicians and athletes: Sylvester Stallone, Pavarotti and Freddy Kruger all feature in Balomania.

Banned since 1998 as a threat to public safety and the environment, the baloeiro crews are now routinely demonised by police and media as dangerous outlaws with criminal connections. Indeed, during filming of Balomania, the Brazilian government increased maximum potential jail time for balloon-gang members to eight years. But Dargis staunchly defends the groups as passion-driven hobbyists funded by their own money and sponsor donations. The only people profiting from the scene, she argues, are crooked police officers demanding bribes to look the other way and informers taking hefty reward pay-outs to snitch on their rivals.

With their painstaking collective dedication, visual panache and impressive feats of back-room engineering, the baloeiros come across here more like highly skilled outsider artists than criminals. Their illicit gatherings, cross-country chases and roof-jumping exploits have something in common with graffiti tag teams, train surfers or the underground army of dance music fans who attended illegal rave parties in late 1980s Britain. Their chief aim, as one veteran puts it, is to “paint the sky without staining the earth.” But outlaw status has made the groups increasingly paranoid, maintaining an intense wall of secrecy around their membership and balloon launch plans. Despite her overwhelmingly positive approach, even Dargis herself comes under suspicion as a potential police infiltrator.

Balomania was clearly a personal passion project for Dargis, and has the messy feel of a chaotic love affair at times. Essentially a one-person film crew, the director’s shaky hand-held style and woozy, poetic voice-over may grate with some viewers. Emotionally exhausted after a three-year journey through this intense male-dominated scene, she leaves Brazil for her native Denmark, missing the launch of a gigantic balloon that she had previously billed as central to the story. But for all its rough edges, this is still a fascinating, gripping and accomplished debut, full of strikingly beautiful close-up footage of balloons taking flight, and heartfelt homages to revered baloeiro godfathers who died during the shoot.

Director, screenwriter: Sissel Morell Dargis
cinematography: Sissel Morell Dargis, Elisa Barbosa Riva
Editing: Biel Andrés, Rikke Selin Als, Isabela Monteiro De Castro, Steen Johannessen, Sissel Morell Dargis
Producers: Jesper Jack, Marie Schmidt Olesen, Marieke van den Bersselaar, Carles Brugueras, Marie Schmidt Olesen
Music: Aquiles Ghirelli, O Novissimo Edgar
Production companies: House of Real (Denmark), Polar Star Films Spain)
World sales: Cargo Film & Releasing, New York, USA
Venue: Dok Leipzig film festival (Doc Alliance Award)
In Portuguese, English
93 minutes