Adrian Van Wyk

Flowers

Filmmaker José Cardoso’s deeply personal Flowers is an exercise in sense-making, led by both his conscious and unconscious mind. Navigating the barrage of online news images produced each day, he transforms these into an unexpected web of connections that link an Amazonian community threatened with the destruction of their land to an extreme right-wing Brazilian President who justifies the exploitation of the Amazon by the rising price of resources precipitated by the war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh teaches us to make our enemy the object of our compassion, and the filmmaker’s three-year-old son marvels at the frogs and flowers growing in the garden.