Susana de Sousa Dias

In 1928, industrialist Henry Ford built a company town in the Brazilian jungle and established a rubber plantation. Within a few years his industrial utopia collapsed, coming to an end in 1945. Fordlândia was largely abandoned and became known as a ghost town.

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In 2000, Susana de Sousa Dias made Criminal Case 141/53, about the sisters Isaura Borges Coelho and Hortênsia Campos Lima, who resisted a 1950s’ Portuguese law that prohibited nurses from marrying. Supported by a montage of archival material, the film told their story, which was shaped by the dictatorship under Salazar. Now, a quarter of a century later, De Sousa Dias returns with a sequel that questions and reflects on her earlier film. She describes how she first encountered the archive material that led her to the sisters’ story in the early 1990s.

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Fordlandia Malaise is a film about the memory and the present of Fordlandia, the company town founded by Henry Ford in the Amazon rain forest in 1928. His aim was to break the British rubber monopoly and produce this material in Brazil for his car production in the United States. Today, the remains of construction testify to the scale of the failure of this neocolonialist endeavor that lasted less than a decade. Nowadays, Fordlandia is a space suspended between times, between the 20th and 21st centuries, between utopia and dystopia, between visibility and invisibility: architectural buildings of steel, glass, and masonry still remain in use while traces of indigenous life left no marks on the ground.

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Just after the Second World War, 5,000 young children were sent from Austria to stay with host families in Portugal, where they could recover from the violence of war. They were often welcomed in by well-to-do families with domestic staff living in sunny villas, and for most of the children this was a holiday in paradise. The contrast with their living conditions at home, and the huge difference between the lives of rich and poor in Portugal in this period, made a deep impression on the young Austrians.

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