Fordlândia Panacea (Portugal, Brazil, 2025, 66′)

Italian premiere

International title : Fordlândia Panacea
Original title : Fordlândia Panacea
Director, photography : Susana de Sousa Dias
Edit : Susana de Sousa Dias, Mário Espada
Music : Marcus Junor Monteiro de Brito, António de Sousa Dias
Production : Kintop

In 1928, American industrialist Henry Ford, in a region of the Amazon, built a city-factory for rubber production called Fordlândia. In only a few years, his utopian project failed and ended in 1945. Fordlândia was largely and came to be portrayed as a ghost town. 

The director, following her medium length film Fordlândia Malaise, returns with this new work – Italian premiere at the festival – marked by a powerful spirit of experimentation, to dive-back into Brazilian history and on the harmful effects for the environment and the population created by colonialism and Ford’s capitalism. Susana de Sousa Dias summons the spirits of the people who built that city and died from diseases and lingers over the people who today live in that area. Italian premiere

Susana de Sousa Dias. Portuguese visual artist and director born in Lisbon in 1962, she attended the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema in Lisbon and studied painting at Escola Superior de Belas-Artes di Lisbona where she graduated in 1991. After ten years, she produced her first documentary Uma Época de Ouro: 1930-1945 on the Portuguese cinema’s golden age, chapter of the documentary series História do Cinema Português. Her movies explore themes of collective memory, fascism, neocolonialism, frequently drawing from archive materials.

Partial filmography: Natureza Morta (doc., 2005), 48 (doc., 2010), Luz Obscura (doc., 2017), Fordlândia Malaise (mlf, doc., 2019), Viagem ao Sol (doc., 2021, co-regia di Ansgar Schäfer), Fordlândia Panacea (doc., 2025).