Palm trees line the garden next to the former presidential palace in Rio de Janeiro. Now a public park complete with plastic playground equipment, the garden once hosted more formal affairs of state. Without narration, this short visually conflates the past and present, deftly reworking more than a century’s worth of images into a sometimes dreamlike state. An evocative soundtrack hints at the historically significant events that occurred there, but the emphasis remains on what is directly observed, either in the sepia-toned past or in the full-color present. Here, the place is the thing.  TBW

Q&A following screening