“In the worlds created by David Lynch horror is constantly lurking just beneath the surface of reality, and the director’s aim is to unveil it even if – and especially if – we do not wish to be exposed to it. Vaz does the same, for our real world and for our responsibility against its other inhabitants.”

E Noite na America (It Is Night in America) begins in true Lynchian fashion, which is not something that can be said about many documentary films. Its opening shot shows a long 360-degree panoramic sky view of a metropolis bathed in a hazy purple/blue-ish shade, accompanied by a combination of sounds; some are clearly identifiable as the sounds of the city, others are more mysterious – and getting stronger and more upsetting with each full circle the camera makes. These are sounds made by an entity other than man, demanding to be heard; what comes next makes us surmise that it was probably the cries of animals.

The film’s general movement, remarkably thought out and executed mainly through editing, is that of a slow zooming in. First we are presented with scenes – humans and animals moving through their environment, going about their lives – from very far and with very little knowledge of what is happening. As we are brought closer to each group, the various species in each group get closer to each other as well, and we start to better understand what is at stake – primarily the conflicts and questions raised by the spatial overlapping between the species. The city we saw in the opening shot, and that the rest of the film will explore, is Brasilia, a capital built from scratch during the 1950s in the middle of a forest – in the process destroying the habitat of the forest’s wildlife by replacing it with our own.

Now forced to live among humans, the numerous and diverse animals, from monkeys to owls and from anteaters to snakes, try to reclaim this space by wandering across it rather than staying on outskirts that are always pushed further away. Yet by doing so they walk towards death, some faster (by becoming roadkill) than others. Those who survive their accidents and are taken care of by veterinarians only become incapable to live in any world; obviously still unfit for the city, they are now unable to go back to the wilderness as well. Empathizing with their tragic destinies, Vaz treats the animals more and more as individuals as the film moves forward, while at the same time the humans remain more of an indistinct group, defined above all by the threat they pose to other species simply through their presence.

The director’s strong anti-speciesist approach translates visually through the idea of shooting the entirety of the film in day for night – the source of the strange, undefinable tint in the opening sequence. Just like the day for night technique inverts our ocular perception, E Noite na America reverses the roles between so-called civilized human beings and wild animals. The ‘eco-horror’, as Vaz defines the tone of her documentary, is imposed upon the latter by the former, and not the other way around. This atmosphere of terror, along with additional visual and auditory elements (a man talking backwards on the radio, a waterfall very reminiscent of the Twin Peaks one), brings us back to the worlds created by David Lynch. There, horror is constantly lurking just beneath the surface of reality, and the director’s aim is to unveil it even if – and especially if – we do not wish to be exposed to it. Vaz does the same, for our real world and for our responsibility against its other inhabitants.