Ainá Xisto's experimental documentary has been selected for two prestigious international film festivals:  Ann Arbor Film Festival (United States) and Cinéma du Réel (France). It will be the world premiere of this project, made in the context of the Master in Cinema.

Metamorphosis’ Chantings Or That Time When I Incarnated As Porpoise will have its world premiere at the 62nd Ann Arbor Film Festival, the oldest experimental film festival in North America. The film will be shown in the Films in Competition programme, which is dedicated to experimental cinema and films that pay special attention to the moving image as an experimental art form. 
At the 46th edition of the Cinéma du Réel international documentary film festival, Ainá Xisto's short film is part of the Première Fenêtre programme, with artistic direction by Clémence Arrivé, and is the only Portuguese film in a total of 12 films by emerging directors.

Ainá Xisto's film, shot on 16mm film, portrays an indigenous community in the Amazon, through dreamlike landscapes and characters, thinking about the ancestry of native peoples through a decolonising prism. The director, in a statement for the Lisbon Screenings of IndieLisboa 2023, said that she uses her cinema to "practice; to rehearse, like a wandering movement", going beyond any limits imposed by the binomials "human, non-human, fiction, documentary", and instead allowing the exodus of "structures of power, of extraction, of ideals of progress, of success."

The project was supervised by Diogo Costa Amarante and Ana Vaz, and produced as part of the Master in Cinema at the School of Arts.

More information on the festival pages:

• Ann Arbor Film Festival
• Cinéma du Réel

Metamorphosis’ Chantings Or That Time When I Incarnated As Porpoise
Experimental documentary, 11 minutes.

Synopsis
Life is Metamorphosis, bounding from being to being as new ways of saying “I”. In 16mm, Ainá Xisto prints an abyssal record guided by a more-than-human relationship through dreamlike landscapes, creating a magical reality inhabited by real characters, open up to dialogue and to others.