Like the most recent events, the 2021 edition of the Sundance Film Festival went from a face-to-face showcase to a virtual one. Despite the change, we will still bring comments on the most interesting experiences we find, from independent films to VR experiments.
The pink cloud it begins with a message that underscores the distressing absurdity of where we are: it is a film about people trapped in an endless quarantine because of a deadly threat outside their doors. It is also one of the first prescient, since it was written in 2017 and filmed in 2019. It has no intentional connection with the pandemic COVID-19, but it is impossible not to draw parallels between The pink cloud and our current reality.
The film takes place in a Brazilian city where a mysterious pink gas cloud hangs over residents and kills people if they are outside for more than 10 seconds, trapping them in any building where they have found shelter for years on end. Said that, The pink cloud it is less about the lethality of your situation and more about the devastating monotony that ensues. The quarantine is seen through the relationship between Giovana (Renata de Lélis) and Yago (Eduardo Mendonça), a case of a night that turns into something much longer when they are forced to live together. Over the following years, Giovana and Yago navigate becoming a couple, having a child, separating without leaving the apartment, virtually dating and getting back together.
It is the moments of silence that are The pink cloudit is more powerful. Calls from FaceTime become tedious, eating the same thing every day becomes a bore, and the only other person in people’s lives starts to irritate all the nerves. We must not suddenly interrupt physical contact with the rest of the world, and the cataclysmic effects of being separated from everyone and everyone are quietly destructive. Life seems to suddenly accelerate and decelerate at the same time. Giovana stops being vehement against children and starts having children, waiting for the lethal cloud to go away and settling in domestic routines because there is no other way to live.
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At the heart of it all is the internal battle between the never-ending hope that things will get better and the ever-diminishing understanding that there is no end in sight. People change careers to find something they can do at home, learn new skills, watch lots of TV, play lots of games, find virtual boyfriends and girlfriends, and go to school at home. Children are born into the void without knowing anything about the outside world beyond what they can see from their windows. Adults who remember life before the clouds dream of returning to the world they knew while working to make their new living conditions the best they can.
The pink cloud it should be a science fiction story, a dystopian world that calmly asks, “How would you handle this situation?” Watching the film in 2021, the answer is obvious: I don’t need to ask myself how I would do that, I know exactly how I handled the fact that I couldn’t see relatives or friends for almost a year. But even with the “fiction” aspect of The pink cloudWith the sci-fi scene removed, the film still reaches the most difficult part of Giovana and Yago’s ordeal, one that I am still struggling with and I’m sure millions of others will too.
When will it all end? How much optimism can anyone have that eventually the pandemic – the pink cloud – will simply disappear and life will return to normal? What goes back to normal to mean? At a time when I used cinema to try to escape or find answers to problems that I have no control over, The pink cloud it is a reminder of our daily lives for the past 300 or more days, and does not provide an immediate answer.
It turns out that, The pink cloud it was exactly the movie I needed. I devoured watching this couple struggle with the same internal battle of hope and acceptance, desires and accommodation, fond memories of ahead of time and preparation for what is to come. The pink cloud, a film written about 1,100 days before the pandemic, ironically became a way to process much of what happened in 2020.