Flower Island (2nd American Film Festival, 1993)

In the short film "Ilha das flores" (Island of Flowers), Brazilian Jorge Furtado makes us laugh before our laughter gets stuck in our throats. Three sentences form the introduction to the short film "Ilha das flores" (Island of Flowers). First, the opening credits say: "This is not a feature film". Then, no less matter-of-factly: "There is a place called Flower Island". And as if the matter-of-factness were not enough, with an additional dash of dimension: "There is no God." Of course: with so much objectivity, irony is involved from the very first moment. "Flower Island" plays with an everyday tone that quickly makes us smile, because food, people, body parts, animals and geographic data are parroted down like it's written in a book. It sounds something like this: "The Japanese differ from other people by the shape of their eyes, their black hair and their own names. This Japanese is called Suzuki. Humans are mammals, bipeds, distinguished from other mammals and bipeds by their highly developed forebrain and thumb opposition. The highly developed forebrain allows humans to store, connect and understand information. The thumb-opposition allows them to handle things with precision. With the combination of these two features, humans have been able to make countless improvements on their planet, including growing tomatoes. The tomato, unlike the whale, the chicken and the Japanese, is a plant."

At some point, after a stretch of the most exquisite amusement, the laughter gets stuck in your throat with exactly the same consequence, because "Island of Flowers" is, right down to the last consequence, a film about the treatment of food, animals and people. For Jorge Furtado, the "fate" of the tomato becomes a question for a society and its relationship to nature and not least to people, especially those who are the poorest in society.

On the one hand, "Island of Flowers" is oriented towards the aesthetics of video clips and, on the other hand, draws on cinematic forms of presentation from the 1960s, when advertising could still be sold as truth. In addition to the film sequences that describe the "fate" of the tomato and the associated behaviour of the characters, Furtado uses a smorgasbord of images for visual explanation alongside an endless commentator. Paintings, drawings from textbooks, real images and filmic archive material are used to counter the text, which is oriented towards scientific exactness. Of the 61 million tonnes of tomatoes grown worldwide each year, the filmmaker follows a selected Brazilian one, planted by a Japanese man, from the plantation, through the supermarket and the kitchen to the "flower island". Behind this poetic name, of course, is the rubbish dump of Porto Alegre. What this rubbish dump has to do with Mr. Suzuki's tomatoes, Mrs. Anete's perfume, the "free" market economy in Brazil and the world market in general is illustrated in the film in a crazy way.