VERDICT: Through colourful, chemically contaminated found footage, Rafael Castanheira Parrode evocatively excavates the trauma of the 1987 radioactivity disaster in Goiânia, Brazil.
When two scrap dealers in Goiânia disassembled a salvaged radiotherapy device in 1987, they unwittingly caused one of the worst radioactive accidents in history, contaminating hundreds of people and killing four. Merging this historical event with archival footage and a motif from Greek myth, with Dragon Tooth Rafael Castanheira Parrode has crafted a film that seeks to reckon with this ordeal. Including a combination of found materials ranging from Lars Westman’s documentary about the tragedy, Jag Har Cesium I Blodet, to Fritz Lang’s fantastical Die Nibelungen, it’s a swirling, visceral collage of contamination.
In Greek mythology, the dragon’s tooth appears in stories like those of Cadmus and Jason in which it is sown into the ground from which spring troublesome warriors. For Castanheira Parrode, this becomes an analogue to the vial of Caesium-137, extracted by the scrap dealers, from which the radioactivity spread. Beginning with an extended sequence from Die Nibelungen in which Siegfried slays a dragon whose blood runs into the water, it is at this point that film’s visuals transform, apparently chemically altered, their high contrast, inversion and phantasmagorical colours suggest contamination of their own.
The edit as this point becomes quicker and what we see on screen is more associative and suggestive than in the service of narrative with themes involving scientific advancement and waste disposal. Certain images become corroded and corrupted by both manipulation and being laid on top of one another; one particularly unsettling sequence sees a human silhouette begin to blur and become misshapen as close-up, almost abstract images of blistering skin are applied to it. Eventually, the familiar form of Godzilla rises from the heady melange – the monster originally the product of nuclear radiation at Nagasaki – and the vision of a tree transforming into a skull, also from Die Nibelungen, suggest the spectre of trauma that lasted well beyond the disaster itself.
Director, editor, cinematography: Rafael Castanheira Parrode
Producers: Camilla Margarida, Belém de Oliveira
Sound design: Belém de Oliveira
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Forum Expanded)
In Portuguese, English
27 minutes
