Isle of Flowers (1989)

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

A different way of telling a story

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Blistering performances.

If there is one out there who already read the "Das Kapital" of Marx, this film might look like well mastered image of that great book. Apart from this, you can feel the genius in this film's montage. A real gem for short film category. Anything, you just touch, buy, eat, drink or listen to is in fact not just itself. In this case, Jorge Furtado tells us what a single tomato hides in itself. Maybe one point lacking, that would have fulfilled the whole story: it would be a fulfilled circle, in regard to story telling (if ever in this case) if the wages of workers of that Japanese tomato plant owner were incorporated. Ie, how much mister suzuki gains, and how much from this is given as salary, and so the bare profit for mister suzuki. It is forcing you to watch over and over again, and to think, what really makes a human being coming after a pig in this world, for the 'chance' of getting some decayed food. Sure, it is a Brazilian movie, but: One thinks about Venezuelaen people that favor Chavez. I guess, those you see on the last screens, do vote for him and will, until they have more rights than those PiGS. And for last: this film told me the best Freedom definition i ever heard.

Beginning at a tomato ranch explaining every step throughout to the Ilha das Flores in a simple, clear-cut manner that is first Monthy Pythonesque funny, but becomes tragic to no end. It starts explaing what happens to the tomato, how it historically is possible to be bought in a supermarket with money and ends up in Ilha das Flores where its inhabitants must pick up food from the dump after the pigs has gotten theirs, this is because in the capitalist world they have 'freedom' and because they are not owned by someone like the pigs are.The contrast between the funny satire and the serious satire is so extreme because they are treated in the exact same way, but with very different implisions.Definitely one of the very best shorts, telling a lot with very little.

Here's a work that definitely proves how exciting and questioning a short movie picture can be.Acting as a director, writer and producer, Jorge Furtado couragely aims a dazzling machinegun at issues as assorted as religion, Holocaust, Brazilian government, poverty, capitalism, and how human intelligence has been used throughout the ages.Using a dialectical method, and narrating the story in a way that "even a Martian would understand", in the words of the author, the film forges a real cinematographical theorem of Brazilian deplorable situation, borrowing as the stage a neighbourhood in the city of Porto Alegre (one of Brazil's most developed ones, by the way). The degrading scenario, however, would apply to any community on the world in which the effects of money (or its lack) on the lives of its inhabitants are more visible.In the movie's touching final take, Furtado destroys the bourgeois concept of Freedom, quoting a line from one of Brazil's greatest poetesses, Cecilia Meirelles, and leaves us wondering whether modern 'civilisation' is as far as the human intellect can take us.

This short is a fine example of people with something crucial to say, having to bend to commercial whims of entertainment in order to hold the audience's attention span long enough to get the message across. It is remarkably witty, and runs at a fanatical pace. The jokes cause a smile, but when the holocaust clips arise, we get the clue that there are weighty matters at stake here. People need to see films like this. Remarkably effective.