Selected by Solange Farkas and Steve SeidThe idea of an indigenous art not influenced by western nuance has long colored Brazil's cultural discourse. Yet the strength of much Brazilian art is its decisive digestion of outside influences. The works in this program thrive on widely shared aesthetic and cultural issues, but solidly situate them in the "pau," the wood, of Brazil. Lucas Bambozzi's I Have No Words (1999, 21:56 mins) fills the frame with free-floating characters in a rootless landscape. His semi-fictive players search for "sensations" that embody an existence outside language. Orlando Da Rosa Faria's Trip (2:20 mins) graphically collapses the space of a gallery to investigate the spectral distance between art and viewer. Kiko Goifman's remarkably composed Olhos Pasmados (2000, 10:20 mins) brings incisive testimony from the streets to voice the pain and poverty of abandonment, whereas Katia Lund's A Minha Alma (2000, 5:48 mins) deconstructs the music video genre to deliver the fury of an uprising and its attendant tragedy. Finally, Marcelo Garcia's Geotomia (2000, 19:20 mins) is a portrait of conceptual artist Priscilla Davanzo who is covering her body with tattooed "cow stains." "I've chosen the cow," she says, "because of the metaphor of its process of digestion. The ruminants are the only animals that digest the same food twice. In a parallel to the human being, who considers himself superior, it is exactly what we don't do."-Steve SeidAlso included:Sem Título #1-4 (Leandro Lima, Gisela Motta, 1999, 1 min). Mentepsicose (Ulisses Wermelinger, Mariana de Vasconcellos, 2:33 mins). Bang Bang (Romulo Fraga, 2000, 2:20 mins).Solange Farkas is director of Videobrasil, a biannual festival located in Sao Paulo.