In its own way probably the saddest movie at DOXA, Brasilia plays like a travelogue made by an alien suffering a deep bout of melancholia. Vancouver filmmaker Bart Simpson lets his cameras do the talking in this portrait of the great modernist citadel built by deluded technocrats in the middle of a desert. Behold the seat of Brazil’s government, designed as a utopian vision of rationalism in the ’50s, now a blanched and faded hellhole where the human spirit goes to die, or to starve on the outskirts in any one of the city’s crumbling satellite boroughs. Speaking of dead spirits, the film gradually rounds on what appears to be the city’s chief purpose, which is to generate endless hordes of civil servants, lawyers, and—worst of all—Rollerbladers. Then again, what else are you going to do on those vast, apocalypse-ready concrete plazas? Gawd, what a ridiculous species we are.

Georgia Straight, May 2017