BRA, PRT 2022 | Directors, Script: Adirley Queirós, Joana Pimenta | Camera: Joana Pimenta | Editor: Cristina Amaral | Cast: Joana Darc Furtado, Léa Alves, Andreia Vieira, Débora Alencar, Mara Alves, Gleide Firmino | Production: Cinco da Norte, Terratreme Filmes | Colour | DCP | 153 min | portuguese OV with english SUB | Steppenwolf Filmverleih

[A] group of women from Sol Nascente (‘rising sun’), on the outskirts of Brasília’s satellite city Ceilândia, find crude oil. Acting as a collective, these women become gasolineheiras: women who turn crude oil into gasoline for sale. They negotiate with motoboys, bikers who distribute it for a cut, while battling competing cartels that threaten their livelihoods and their lives […]. Rather than striking it rich, the women enter and help develop an underground economy whose anti-establishment ethos provides the pressure for a fuming volcano of rebellion.

In DRY GROUND BURNING, the future isn’t just female: it is Black, lesbian, profoundly matriarchal. This community is carefully organised, and is supremely conscious not only of its marginalised position, outside most conservative networks of working- and middle-class families, but also of its power as a potential mass movement […]. A scene in which the directors juxtapose the image of Andreia campaigning through a megaphone on a moving truck with footage of crowds cheering for Jair Bolsonaro fleshes out this political potential beautifully: you might imagine for a second that it’s the PPP being feted, with fireworks ablaze to proclaim the dawn of a new era. (Ela Bittencourt, Sight and Sound, 2022)